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X Ray
Some prowl sea-beds, some hurtle to a star and, mother, some obsessed turn over every stone or open graves to let that starlight in. There are men who would open anything. Harvey, the circulation of the blood, and Freud, the circulation of our dreams, pried honourably and honoured are like all explorers. Men who’d open men. And those others, mother, with diseases like great streets named after them: Addison, Parkinson, Hodgkin—physicians who’d arrive fast and first on any sour death-bed scene. I am their slowcoach colleague, half afraid, incurious. As a boy it was so: you know how my small hand never teased to pieces an alarm clock or flensed a perished mouse. And this larger hand’s the same. It stretches now out from a white sleeve to hold up, mother, your X-ray to the glowing screen. My eyes look but don’t want to; I still don’t want to know.