for Dr. John Butt
Among the things that startle
are a set of lungs
perfectly removed from a body,
such that their owner
could float along
and aspirate water yet
never taste burning salt,
the brine merely washing in and out
of that terrified O, a hole gushing fear,
in a palsy the signature of death.
Tourists gaped at the rescue effort,
gasping when helicopters would plunge
from inland to offshore
reclaiming bodies.
Their mouths would ape terrified O's,
murmuring while contemplating flowers littered on the rocks,
the scent of ocean stinging their exposed eyes,
breath taken shallowly
and not such a draught
of rarefied air
as much be in a pressurized cabin
the moment before framing the grimace
which would drink deep
and not taste.
I climbed nimbly over
ancient pathos and guilt
while gazing up at the sun
which rendered Icarus-like
a flaming airborne apparatus,
and I too vicariously followed helicopters out to sea,
then back again,
while others watched on,
some with salt-stained eyes
and terrible exhalations
of hot, painful air
rendered humid and filtered,
coming in jagged waves and
slowly I left that place
as if waking tenderly from
a salt-stained bed of Gothic rocks,
licking my lips as
local fishermen were interviewed
as authorities on this sort of thing,
everyone forming their words from a platform of open mouths
and those lungs again
drinking deep now
Shane Neilson
Clinical Clerk; Faculty of Medicine; Dalhousie University
This poem first appeared in Literary Review of Canada 1999;7(6).