Summary:

This poem captures the last thoughts and sensations of a person on her death bed. Surrounded by mourners who are bracing themselves for her death, the narrator’s focus as she dies is on the most mundane of living creatures: a buzzing fly. The final ebb of consciousness is depicted as a loss of light and sight: "And then the Windows failed--and then / I could not see to see--."

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The narrator describes the disorientation felt as she attempted unsuccessfully to organize her thoughts. The "sequence [of thoughts] ravelled out of reach / Like balls upon a floor."

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The narrator, who has narrowly escaped death, feels as if there were "odd secrets . . . to tell" to the world of the living. She speculates about her next (and last) encounter with death, anticipating it with curiosity, and resigning herself to the "slow tramp [of] the centuries."

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In this short poem (11 lines) the writer sees a whole world in the microscope: among the cells, a world of dreams and suffering, of courage and death.

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The narrator carries hothouse orchids as a gift to a friend in the hospital. When he gets there, he feels out of place, not having expected "barricades / against infection, the doors’ / pneumatic psshh . . . . " He regrets that his gift flowers are tame, when "the room / cried out for wildness." The place is sleek, efficient, and antiseptic. His friend--who is not described in the poem--"would never rise / from the motored bed." Who could blame the narrator for looking away? Or for wishing that he could have brought a gift of wilder, more glorious flowers? (40 lines).

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An epigraph preceding this 28-line poem, apparently from notes by the physician-writer’s physician-father, sets the action of the poem in Wales in 1938. In the operating room, the surgeon attempts to locate the brain tumor of a patient who was under only local anesthesia because of his blood pressure. In those days in that place, finding the tumor was a "somewhat hit and miss" procedure that seems to have involved looking for it with one’s fingers.

A grotesque image, but all goes well until the patient, in a "gramophone" or "ventriloquist" voice not his own, cries out, "Leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone!" The doctor withdraws from the brain, but the patient then dies, after which the mood in the operating room is shocked and speechless, as "silence matched the silence under snow."

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Metcalf explores relationships between the worlds of science and experience in the three parts of this collection: devolve, involute, and evolutional. He makes it clear at the beginning: "the radiant truth is not alive / it is a sin to call consciousness dead" (10). At the same time, though, "Nobody needs YOU. Complete this form" (14). If consciousness devolves on matter, then the soul--where presumably consciousness used to live before it devolved--may be permitted to involute without consequence. "Yes, yes, / the dawn," our Bard writes, "it is beautiful. I try to miss it" (25). "Never mind who my parents were. / They dropped me off down here / on their way to somewhere else." ("Stork’s Kid," 41)

The final section, "Evolutional," suggests the direction in which our species might be moving: "Maybe I can live to one hundred and eight . . . by transplantation." ("Last to Go," 49) Perhaps the poet has already found his niche in this process, "It took me many years to find a market--niche / in speculative contemporary Australian social evolution . . . " (67) And yet, beneath all this (or above it), the poet comments, "I promised myself to speak in love only . . . You push me / for that poem I have not written yet." ("Our Poem," 43)

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The narrator describes his experiences as an after-hours cleaning person in the autopsy room. The macabre nature of the work carried out there during the day by the medical professionals (who appear to take it for granted) is vividly impressed on the narrator when he comes upon "a pale and shapely leg." This evokes his own memories and feelings of sexuality. He is disturbed, no longer "has the strength of ten," and can’t involve himself with his wife when he goes home.

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An empathetic physician feels as if there were "no boundary" between him and his patient, until he "intrude[s]" by drawing blood. As the patient’s "sufferance rises" during the painful procedure, the physician feels that he is breaking the Hippocratic Oath by adding to the patient’s suffering.

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This is a collection of poems written about breast cancer, many of the poems by women who have experienced the disease. A very full range of response to the disease is evident in these poems, from dry humor regarding prostheses; to fear and denial of the disease; to one’s often painful adjustment (along with family members) to a different body; to emotional transcendence of the experience of breast cancer.

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