Prose Poem


  Atlas of Forensic Pathology


by


Lucas North
ATLAS  OF  FORENSIC  PATHOLOGY,  EXHIBIT GAZ-12

With no life of my own I finger another’s lost existence until it goes soft and frayed at the edges
bent into it from a necessary routine of secretive hiding and selective revealing driver’s license, party
membership card, permits to travel within one empire split by so many orders.

The print on them like the mugshot, indecipherable and reversed by another history, so hated and so lost
that I am the only one left to recover this life. Re-read it, re-view it.

On nights tainted thick by vanilla and liquorice and the cold that forges them I stand outside, my hand on a long black bonnet catching snow shards, lie back on leather gone brittle and cracked in some places, soft as velour in others - I smell the straw-like stuffing inside the seat-frames- fragrant as new.

Sat for decades, these tires are flat-spotted into eternity, a factory floor: waiting. an underground parking depot: waiting. a mechanic’s hoist: waiting. a shipping container to an enemy land: waiting. myself:
waiting. This limousine had led a life, so many lives unappreciated while they were lived, only now treasured by person’s unable to know that loathed past.

The translation speaks of a good job, filled with overheard conversations, beautiful views of empty slate streets and long waits staring at the wrought, black profile of Stalin, only to look down at a copy of Pravda rested across the steering wheel, that text the closest one will ever come to the thoughts and words of the idol himself.

The heating system never worked, not even from the factory. In the trunk I discover another part of my inheritance. The suit of a giant to match the expression on the mugshot gone pale with handling, tattooed by the careless stamp of the state that face wincing at seeing the new identifying feature on the picture, despairing over the necessity of one to match flawlessly the other. That they are: One. And another.

This suit, like the car itself and these fragmenting papers appear perfect in time’s stilled preservation in a Petrograd rail yard, in a Utah barn, in a Fremantle garage. On the papers is a stamp: None of these things are to be used again, conventional thinking once again dictated  by an ethereal, ephemeral decision process.

Here, now, in the future that could never be, in an America that could never be allowed, in an Australia that never could have been regardless, in a Ukraine that will never again be what was never hoped to begin with, I am left to wonder in futility:

Does death come in a swift signature, at the end of a bullet and the exit wound it leaves rude as a slammed door?  Or as a gas so insidious it is detectable only by the chemical reaction it leaves as a scar on a consciousness realising betrayal and searching conscience, finding nought justice, there being the pain, yet being pain enough?

Fantasies of a particularly and peculiarly Western youth, an affordably active imagination? Perhaps it was not death which brought the separation - perhaps retirement arrived before the cold boredom or the excess of routine and convention led to a sin against the State which could not go unpunished.

Perhaps all of these mementos were abandoned and forgotten with an emotion close to a numb happiness, if that substituted pride for a career of service. Some feeling tossed that black book into the glove box, but then it also took the time to fold this woollen suit so carefully beside the spare wheel and the emptied rifle case, telescope removed, bore filled.

My insomnia is a methanol fire fuelled by this most solid aberration of existence, my fingers trace the strange Braille of the hood letters, the series of consonants with their backward ‘R’ feeling as tactile as any
Eastern Block accent, stern and sure-footed as any Soviet policy statement belted out in a stream of stamped chrome, as authoritarian as the word of God, as bold and shining as any demigod flickering on a blue-and-grey cathode ray tube.

A funeral parade, a million mourners rallying in an obligatory fear, millions more viewers shrugging in indifference as they reach down to tin trays of red, white and blue for another spoon piled with TV dinner.
My inheritance in the background, making its mark in scorned history.

I put the suit in onto a hanger and purchase a frame to house it. I put the papers into a four-sided jewel box.
These items I send to a place which will appreciate them, far away once more though I can’t decipher the address and I don’t pay any attention to memorise.

The vehicle, however, I treat as any genuine Bricoleur would. It has had one life it did not deserve, and in doing so, a graceless though certainly not disgraceful survival it deserves another.

Those perishing tires hang on the wall now, their bias and ply sagging still for the lazy comfort of gravity; let them. Changed, replaced, like oil and petrol turned to vinegar, grease tough and old yet pliable as old Negro skin, a blue guitarist’s hands.

On the edge of a city that barely is by chronology’s dint, in a time that was never conceived but simply was through petri-dish politics gone rabid and mutant, in streets paved a dozen times between its first and last journey, with a driver’s hand so unimaginably foreign through space and a worm-hole through time as to be adequate proof of alien existence, again this chrome hood ornament cuts wind that may be a willing and welcoming victim. The cosmic momentum smiling like those sleepy eyelids over pitting old headlamps.

Odometer rested at a figure matching total production: 21,783. Flashed by a speed camera facing east on Toodyay Road, I am glad to watch those numbers become forever jumbled, imperfect, my own.


Lucas North © Copyright 2002 - Lucas North is a published writer. His work appears in Fables and Reflection and has had poetry published in Blue Dog: Australian Poetry. He aims to keep 'The Sabbath Dream Alive!'