Dannie Abse

Some prowl sea-beds, some hurtle to a star and, mother, some obsessed turn over every stone or open graves to let that starlight in. There are men who would open anything. Harvey, the circulation of the blood, and Freud, the circulation of our dreams, pried honourably and honoured are like all explorers. Men who’d open men. And those others, mother, with diseases like great streets named after them: Addison, Parkinson, Hodgkin—physicians who’d arrive fast and first on any sour death-bed scene. I am their slowcoach colleague, half afraid, incurious. As a boy it was so: you know how my small hand never teased to pieces an alarm clock or flensed a perished mouse. And this larger hand’s the same. It stretches now out from a white sleeve to hold up, mother, your X-ray to the glowing screen. My eyes look but don’t want to; I still don’t want to know.

Late, I have come to a parched land doubting my gift, if gift I have, the inspiration of water spilt, swallowed in the sand. To hear once more water trickle, to stand in a stretch of silence the divining pen twisting in the hand: sign of depths alluvial. Water owns no permanent shape, sags, is most itself descending; now, under the shadow of the idol, dry mouth and dry landscape. No rain falls with a refreshing sound to settle tubular in a well, elliptical in a bowl. No grape lusciously moulds it round. Clouds have no constant resemblance to anything, blown by a hot wind, flying mirages; the blue background, light constructions of chance. To hold back chaos I transformed amorphous mass—and fire and cloud— so that the agèd gods might dance and golden structures form. I should have built, plain brick on brick, a water tower. The sun flies on arid wastes, barren hells too warm and me with a hazel stick! Rivulets vanished in the dust long ago, great compositions vaporized, salt on the tongue so thick that drinking, still I thirst. Repeated desert, recurring drought, sometimes hearing water trickle, sometimes not, I, by doubting first, believe; believing, doubt.

White coat and purple coat a sleeve from both he sews. That white is always stained with blood, that purple by the rose. And phantom rose and blood most real compose a hybrid style; white coat and purple coat few men can reconcile. White coat and purple coat can each be worn in turn but in the white a man will freeze and in the purple burn.

When the snake bit Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa while he was praying the snake died. (Each day is attended by surprises or it is nothing.) Question: was the bare-footed, smelly Rabbi more poisonous than the snake or so God-adulterated he’d become immune to serpent poison? Oh great-great-great-uncles, your palms weighing air, why are you arguing? Listen, the snake thought (being old and unwell and bad-tempered as hell) Death, where’s thy sting? In short, was just testing: a snake’s last fling. Yes, the so-called snake was dying anyway, its heart calcified and as old as Eden. No, that snake was A1 fit but while hissing for fun it clumsily bit its own tongue. No, Hanina invented that snake; not for his own sake but for first- class, religious publicity. No no, here’s the key to it. Ask: did the Rabbi, later on, become a jumpy, timid man? Remember, he who has been bitten by a snake thereafter becomes frightened of a rope … Bearded men in darkening rooms sipping lemon tea and arguing about the serpent till the moon of Russia, of Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, rose above the alien steeples—centuries of sleep. Now, tonight, a clean-shaven rabbi who once studied in Vienna says snake-venom contains haemolysins, haemo- coagulants, protolysins, cytolysins and neurotoxins and that even in Hanina ben Dosa’s day a snake was a snake—unless, of course, it was a penis, an unruly penis, making a noise like one pissing on a mound of fresh hot ashes. Oh great-great-great-uncles did you hear him? And are your handbones weighing moonshine?

(A true incident) ‘Only a local anaesthetic was given because of the blood pressure problem. The patient, thus, was fully awake throughout the operation. But in those days—in 1938, in Cardiff, when I was Lambert Rogers’ dresser—they could not locate a brain tumour with precision. Too much normal brain tissue was destroyed as the surgeon searched for it, before he felt the resistance of it … all somewhat hit and miss. One operation I shall never forget … ’ (Dr Wilfred Abse) Sister saying—‘Soon you’ll be back in the ward,’ sister thinking—‘Only two more on the list,’ the patient saying—‘Thank you, I feel fine’; small voices, small lies, nothing untoward, though, soon, he would blink again and again because of the fingers of Lambert Rogers, rash as a blind man’s, inside his soft brain. If items of horror can make a man laugh then laugh at this: one hour later, the growth still undiscovered, ticking its own wild time; more brain mashed because of the probe’s braille path; Lambert Rogers desperate, fingering still; his dresser thinking, ‘Christ! Two more on the list, a cisternal puncture and a neural cyst.’ Then, suddenly, the cracked record in the brain, a ventriloquist voice that cried, ‘You sod, leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’— the patient’s dummy lips moving to that refrain, the patient’s eyes too wide. And, shocked, Lambert Rogers drawing out the probe with nurses, students, sister, petrified. ‘Leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’ that voice so arctic and that cry so odd had nowhere else to go—till the antique gramophone wound down and the words began to blur and slow, ‘ … leave … my … soul … alone … ’ to cease at last when something other died. And silence matched the silence under snow.

A heritage of a sort. A heritage of comradeship and suffocation. The bawling pit-hooter and the god’s explosive foray, vengeance, before retreating to his throne of sulphur. Now this black-robed god of fossils and funerals, petrifier of underground forests and flowers, emerges with his grim retinue past a pony’s skeleton, past human skulls, into his half-propped up, empty, carbon colony. Above, on the brutalised, unstitched side of a Welsh mountain, it has to be someone from somewhere else who will sing solo not of the marasmus of the Valleys, the pit-wheels that do not turn, the pump-house abandoned; nor of how, after a half-mile fall regiments of miners’ lamps no longer, midge-like, rise and slip and bob. Only someone uncommitted, someone from somewhere else, panorama-high on a coal-tip, may jubilantly laud the re-entry of the exiled god into his shadowless kingdom. He, drunk with methane, raising a man’s femur like a sceptre; she, his ravished queen, admiring the blood-stained black roses that could not thrive on the plains of Enna.