The Anatomists- A. C. Clarke

viii: StAnza Presents…

A. C. Clarke

The Anatomists

Their trophy cases line the walls

of the medical school. Imagine their patience

the deftness with which they’d ease a kidney

free of its moorings, scoop a brain out of its shell

under dull light in a fug of ether and coalgas

their white coats bloodying like a butcher’s.

And in the mounting such attention to detail!

See how they rolled back muscle-sleeves

from a flayed arm before digging to the bone,

assembled exact as meccano

the twenty-seven bones of a filleted hand

syringed quicksilver through tissue-slivers

until they glowed, starbursts in formalin.

Even a fused foetus, toggled across

its opened chest with stitches no seamstress would own,

displayed for dramatic effect, each head tilted

openmouthed away from the lungs

which couldn’t breathe for them both.

All this for a final answer. On the brink

these men could walk blithe among skulls,

bottle stillbirths, with the same cool zeal

their tutor preached, whose corpse (his last request)

his students carved - while noting with precision t

he curious pathology of the heart.

(First published on the ArranArt website, © A C Clarke 2009)

A. C. Clarke has published five full collections and five pamphlets, two of the latter, Owersettin and Drochaid, in collaboration with Maggie Rabatski and Sheila Templeton. Her fifth full collection, A Troubling Woman (Oversteps Books) came out in 2017. She was one of four winners in the Cinnamon Press 2017 pamphlet competition with War Baby and in 2019 won the Second Light Long Poem competition for the second time. She was commended in the National Poetry Competition in 2005 and longlisted for it in 2014. She is currently working on an extensive series of poems about Gala Éluard, later Gala Dalí, and the Surrealist circles in which she moved. The first set of these is due to be published as a pamphlet by Tapsalteerie in 2021. A second set was shortlisted for the Cinnamon Literary Awards in 2020.

StAnza brings poetry to audiences and enables encounters with poetry through events and projects in Scotland and beyond, especially their annual spring festival in St Andrews. www.stanzapoetry.org Facebook: stanzapoetry Instagram: @stanzapoetry