In the whistlers’ room, no words go
from face to face
The mouths look good
but every throat is bandaged.
They manage,
whistling through their neck straws, happy
the way child-twins who speak invented words are
until every communicative sound shrivels
in the super-heated air outside their circle.
§
The skin-grafts looked like ridges, one like a bluff.
§
Gunman W——, wounded in France 16.9.16 admitted
30.9.16, whole of intervening jaw missing. On the right side
stumps remaining, the whole of the upper lip and the whole
chin swept away, the tongue adherent to the margin
of the wound, three months later the first plastic done, a
large volcanic artificial chin attached by a splint to the upper
teeth, attempt to make a new mouth over this, the result
indifferent, no attempt to remake the chin carried out. Had it
been possible to retain the appliance, a satisfactory mouth
might have eventually been obtained, but the swinging in
of the flap on the left side caused considerable tension of the
new lip, and it was decided to remove the prosthesis, close
the lower opening to prevent dribbling. The intermediate
stage photographic records (now missing) showed widening
of the mouth to the left so that access to the buccal cavity
could be obtained by the dental surgeon, Captain Fry,
working in conjunction with Sir Francis Farmer, who designed
an appliance to next stretch forward the tissues of the chin,
which had become more amenable to traction. The patient,
however, was not particularly tolerant to this procedure, and
I felt that perhaps one was wasting time, and, after consul-
tation with Sir Francis Farmer and Captain Fry, who advised
one to carry out a more radical procedure for the building up
of a new chin, the author obtained from Lieutenant W. W.
Edwards, the sculptor, a kind of chin in plaster the size of
a prosthesis necessary to make a chin over it. Around this
artificial apparatus was built an epithelial pouch: three
skin-flaps reflected and sutured over the middle raw surface
outwards, flaps accurately designed beforehand in tinfoil.
The raw area thus created by the turning in of these skin-flaps,
including the prominence of the new chin, accurately gauged
beforehand, a model cut in rolled-out lead plate, to which
were added the necessary pedicles, a large double pedicle
scalp-flap down to the chin. It all healed by first intention,
the pedicles being carefully attached—sewn skin-edge to
skin-edge, the central portion of the scalp skin-grafted, the
Thiersch grafts being taken from a tattoo mark in his right
forearm, the idea being that the blue mark would show
less conspicuously than white skin. It is interesting to note
that this mark contained the letters B-E-R-T and up to the
time of writing, six months after the operation, the letters
are still quite clearly legible on the top of this patient’s scalp,
the original scalp skin swung via pedicle graft along and below
the chin and lower denture to the remains of the mandible,
no crinkling or retraction of the grafted scalp-flap occurring now
—three months after the operation—and a satisfactory beard
could be easily grown. The patient, however, prefers to shave.
§
What pokes out gets hit.
Statues tossed
by the hoards, by
anyone angry in an empty city,
knocked from
pedestals, high gables, and
a nose falls,
what’s draped.
Everything—the bulging leaf,
rivery stone cloth
—off.
A young one lost his,
hole with a tube all.
The nurse
cried. He
recovered.
§
In mountain top removal, valley fill mining
they clear the trees first
then proceed to surgery.
The rubble from it chokes the streams.
§
An eye-shaped patch from my upper back
—something like Picasso’s
in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or Woman in a Hairnet:
kid-crayon boat, the skin still tanned
from growing up on the water in north Florida
—transferred to the front, sewn onto skin that’s whiter.
Poor monster. He had skin from others—corpses!—
right from the start.
Everybody ran or, if cornered,
hit him. He was a
man, a person,
full-grown, infant-minded
lying in the lean-to with the
hole in the wall that joined it to the house,
invisible membrane
—like an eye’s!—
all that divided him from a life,
world of the close-knit family he took as his own
until they saw him.
He’d been free
to learn how to live by watching.
As in the woods below the moon he’d learned—
open, animal
—until he saw himself.
•
F saw the eyes open—
It was too much to imagine,
there being a soul in that
and he couldn’t name him.
•
Without a name there’s no
entity
to hold against its own cells’
multiple dividings past itself,
there being nothing
of what we started as
materially.
•
What if everyone were eyeless
and we could only
hear, sense space,
so that that sensing eclipsed seeing,
roared it to the side?
Old men’s voices, chanting, channeling,
choruses in cathedrals
—you have to close your eyes to see it.
•
The sound of the gueule cassée’s voice
only made things harder
for the boy, who hadn’t seen his father since hed
been blessed by artillery.
He knew the voice, the walk and other subtle gestures,
hints caught every instant in the
incremental process of perception.
Knowing him made the marred face even worse
just as the monster’s human traits had turned him into
more of a monster to his maker
or anyone who saw him.
•
The soldier dreamed he was a clay jar,
the kind shaped like a female body.
Had he been hit? He didn’t know.
He stood in clay.
Spring came, but with the trees
eviscerated,
you could tell the Earth moved forward
only by the birds, the cold’s
momentary incinerations.
•
‘space as medium rather than
container’
—the body as that?
That through which we are
no matter what the shape, the scars.
•
To appear, to shine
is to be a face.
Love possible without one?
Effacement’s closer to death, the face
wingless,
nothing but a wing.
•
Prodigy, divine
omen
—monstri
see more, warn us.