This is another poem with medical undertones.
It's in two parts.
The first part is called Lunch with a Pathologist.
The second part is called No Reply.
My colleague knows by heart the morbid verse
of facts, the dead weight of a man's liver,
a woman's lungs, a baby's kidneys.
At lunch he recited unforgettably,
After death, of all soft tissues the brain's
the first to vanish, the uterus the last.
Yes, I said, at dawn I've seen silhouettes hunched
in a field against the skyline, each one feasting,
preoccupied, silent as gas.
Partial to women they've stripped women bare
and left behind only the taboo food, the uterus,
inside the skeleton.
My colleague wiped his mouth with a napkin,
hummed, picked shredded meat from his canines, said,
you're a peculiar fellow, Abse.
Why?
Because when I went home, no one was home
because I knew I was awake, a man asleep is a man enslaved.
I stood up, walked into the hall where
I dialed the number because of some strange ancestor,
because I'm Welsh, because I'm a Jew,
because of the audible clock's rounder than any circle
I can draw, because I've shared the particular lunatic boredom
of caged animals, because I've been touched on a scar
and felt nothing or almost nothing,
because when sick I'm still a doctor, because pathologists
aver, The first organ to disappear
is the brain, the uterus the last,
because I shan't forget that ever,
because I walked into the hall where
I stood next to the telephone I thought of a number doubled it.