Ablation

Inside the Northern Generaltheyre trying to burn awaya small piece of your heart.

I want to know which bit,how muchand what it holds.

My questions livebetween what doctors call the heartand what we mean by it,

wide as the gap between brain and mind.And in our lineage of bypassed heartswe should be grateful

for the literal. I know my heartis your heart good for running,not much else

and later as you sit up in your borrowed bedI get the whole thing wrong,call it oblation. Offering

or sacrice. As if youd given something up.As if their tiny re was ritualand we could warm by it.

Not everyone who writes and reads poetry is a horse-drawn arts person, with zero knowledge of the sciences beyond a little light Googling, but there are still plenty of us around. And we shouldnt despise the online toe-dipping so readily available to science outsiders: it can still energise curiosity and develop brain power. The internet is a friendly sort of school: no one will throw you out for being dumb at quadratic equations or, for that matter, tin-eared to prosody. You can forget assessment, progression, humiliation. You can wing across borders. Its all there, and all connectable, time, patience and imagination permitting.

The same day I discovered this weeks poem while browsing online, I had an email from my daughter, quoting some research on angiogenesis that had recently caught her interest. The paper she quoted, based on research by Bentley and Chakravartula on cell behaviour, made a good case for the hypothesis that cell activity is a perception-action process. In other words, that cells engage in a process analogous to a human moving their eyes or their heads or their bodies to create and interact with variables in optic flow. Cells make decisions! I found this exciting and, although Helen Morts poem deals with a different process, cardiac ablation, I think its special connection of the mechanical and emotional had made me far more receptive to the scientific prose. Both disciplines, poetry and cell biology, seemed to jump out of their respective study rooms and embrace like joyously absconding schoolkids. Reading the poem again after the scientific paper was like hearing a beautifully simple song, a melodic and emotional pattern into which the careful precisions of science had been distilled and shaped.

The speaker in Ablation sits at a hospital bedside, wanting answers to the simple, urgent questions people ask at such times. The questions only seem simple, of course. We know, and the speaker knows, that the heart is not a container for feelings and attributes, and the process of ablation is unlikely to burn away love, courage or good cheer but how do we understand these attributes if they have been displaced from their traditional bodily home? Such questions, the speaker rightly says, live / between what doctors call the heart / and what we mean by it, // wide as the gap between brain and mind.

The stanza break above also indicates the gap between the language lay people use about their bodies and minds, and the objective language of medical science. Sometimes I wonder if the constant anguished discussions in the UK about the failures of the NHS arent only practical in origin, but also reflect a profounder sense of underlying problems communication, as if patient and medical professional spoke across each other in different languages.

Morts poem centres on an ancient definition of the heart, now a well-worn metaphor, and does something almost unbelievably fresh with it. The phrase the lineage of bypassed hearts is particularly suggestive. It may allude to a family history of heart-bypass surgery, or to a habitual evasion of emotion. It seems to include a general and well-grounded fear people have of being reduced in their humanity when they become patients.

The speaker in the poem continues to seek a place for the transcendent. An appropriate conceit the misunderstanding of ablation as oblation enables the process. Its a beautifully economical move to retrieve what the narrator most fears will be lost, allowing the tiny fire of the surgical procedure to become ritual and provide both participants with the literal warmth of their shared love, and their sense of its significance.

You dont have to be Richard Dawkins to disagree profoundly with John Keats (a generally wiser and broader thinker than Dawkins) that Isaac Newton destroyed the rainbow by reducing it to a prism. This poem is not condemning medical science, but asking that an imaginative space be kept open. Emotionally, people need ablation and oblation to be allowed to rhyme.

Ablation is from Helen Morts collection No Map Could Show Them (Chatto & Windus, 2016). Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.

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Poem of the week: Ablation by Helen Mort - The Guardian