The Surgeon at 2 a.m.
by Sylvia Plath




The white light is artificial, and hygienic as heaven.
The microbes cannot survive it.
They are departing in their transparent garments, turned aside
From the scalpels and the rubber hands.
The scalded sheet is now snowfield, frozen and peaceful.
The body under it is in my hands.
As usual, there is no face. A lump of Chinese white.
With seven holes thumbed in. The soul is another light.
I have not see it; it does not fly up.
Tonight it has receeded like a ship's light.

It is a garden I have to do with-tubers and fruits
Oozing their jammy substances
A mat of roots. My assistants hook them back.
Stenches and colors assail me.
This is the lung-tree.
These orchids are splendid. They spot and coil like snakes.
The heart is a red bell-bloom, in distress.
I am so small
In comparison to these organs!
I worm and hack in a purple wilderness.

The blood is a sunset. I admire it.
I am up to my elbows in it, red and squeaking.
Still it seeps up, it is not exhausted.
So magical! A hot spring
I must seal off and let fill
The intricate, blue piping under this pale marble.
How I admire the Romans--
Aqueducts, the Baths of Caracalla, the eagle nose!
The body is a Roman thing.
It has sut its mouth on the stone pill of repose.

It is a statue the orderlies are wheeling off.
I have perfected it.
I am left with an arm or a leg,
A set of teeth, or stones
To rattle in a bottle and take home,
And tissues and slices-a pathological salami.
Tonight the parts are entombed in an icebox.
Tomorrow they will swim.
In vinegar like saints' relics.
Tomorrow the patient will a clean, pink plastic limb.

Over one bed in the ward, a small blue light
Announces a new soul. The bed is blue.
Tonight, for this person, blue is a beautiful color.
The angels of morphia have borne him up.
He floats an inch from the ceiling,
I walk among sleepers in gauze sarcophagi.
The red night lights are flat moons. They are dull with blood.
I am the sun, in my white coat,
Grey faces, shuttered by drugs, follow me like flowers.



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