This stunning poem, about the mystery of life and spontaneous generation, was written by the Irish poet Sinead Morrissey when she was pregnant with her first child. We were lucky enough to hear a private poetry reading by her in Belfast on England Semester last year, and I was struck by her humility and genuine sense of wonder. How can I possibly write anything worth reading when I've just re-visited one of the most awe-inspiring pieces of literature that I know of? Instead, I chose to copy the poem out of my copy of her book. Enjoy.
Matter
from Through the Square Window by Sinead Morrissey
Aristotle observed and recorded it all-
that out of rainwater, the marrow
of the human spine, foam from the sea,
or the putrefying carcasses of bulls and horses
spring living beings: frogs, serpents, anchovies,
bees and scarabs, locusts, weevils, maggots.
St Augustine agreed: what matter that the smallest
(and most meddlesome) of God’s creatures
find no mention in the chronicle of the Ark?
So long as alluvial mud remained, or rotted
wood, of rinsed white bones of crocodiles
after the wash abated and the salvaged couple
and their braying entourage were pitched
on top of Ararat, wasps and gnats and fleas
would manifest once more in clouds and colonies
without a union of the sexes (like Mary)
and the earth would effortlessly teem.
Recipes for rats and ‘small white puppies
a child might play with’ followed
during the Middle Ages, which typically included
hay, excrement, dirty shirts, wool
simmered for an hour then hung to dry
in an outhouse or chicken coop
(the air of such places being itself
so mutable and laden with infusoria,
it acts as a bridge to live). Golems
moulded from clay still needed a spell
to keep them animated, as though by
growing bigger and more complicated,
the offspring of the elements
were in danger of winding down,
yet Paracelsus, arch-advocate of decay,
saw no reason not to apply
the laws of spontaneous generation
to ourselves: let the semen of a man
putrefy itself for forty days in a sealed
cucurbite, it shall begin, at last, to live.
Fed on an arcanum of human blood
and kept in darkness, his fleet homunculus
had all the features of a human child.
Leeuwenhoek bore this experiment in mind
when, decades later, using his own microscope,
he scrutinized his sperm, magnified
as much as three hundred times and fashioned
like a bell, with the wrought perfection
of a tiny man curled inside each globule.
Ovists may have envisaged instead
a sacred cabinet of children, encased
inside each egg, opening in time
both backwards and forwards
to the breaking of Eve and the End
of the World, the likelihood remained:
whether one believed in this, or the evidence
of a light-blanched workshop and a knack
for polished glass, or whether one went back
to what the Greeks expressed
as the facts of reproduction,
a woman’s quest for contraception,
stacked against the odds of dogged visitors
finding lodging in the womb
at any beckoning, was hopeless.
No wonder Soranus suggested water from blacksmiths’.
No wonder olive oil, the pulp of a pomegranate,
honey, pine resin, mercury, beeswax,
pennyroyal, tobacco juice, arrowroot, tansy
were burnt, brewed, inhaled, ingested,
inserted into the cervix, or buried in fields left fallow
if the coppery stain of menstruation
persisted into the seventh day.
No wonder witches consulted the sky.
And though I know, thanks in part to Pasteur–
to his gauze impediments and penchant
for boiling–how your came to enter,
how you came to roll and hiccup and kick
against the windowless dark, feet to my heart
and skull to the pelvic cradle, I still think
of our lovemaking as a kind of door
to wherever you were, waiting in matter,
spooled into a form I have not yet been shown
by the umprompted action of nature,
by something corrupting in an earthenware pot
in Corinth, say, or Kingstown.
Stay the wind on a river eight weeks after equinox–
witness blue-green mayflies lift off
like a shaken blanket; add algae
and alchemical stones to the lake floor
in the strengthening teeth of winter, what swans.
Happy Saturday. :]
