The Lost School of Botany
by Michael Henry
She held the Peter Rabbit tray
with Lucozade and tonic water
in which a lozenge fizzed saffron pollen.
Then brought out her medical instruments:
an auriscope, cone-headed, with a gaud
of bright light to peer, tunnel-eyed,
into the hanging gardens of my ear;
and her spatula, bird’s foot light,
to depress my tongue and see a lost school
of botany: stamens, anthers, pistils,
the seed-box of my larynx.
There was a glint of white in her chestnut hair
as if she were transmuting into
her own silverware; half a halo
or the speculum on a bird’s wing.
She shook her Fahrenheit thermometer,
the glass broke in an unhappy accident;
balls of mercury rolled down
the fragile lifeline of her hand
and onto my receptive palm.
I caught them, as many as I could,
little balls on a hand-held bagatelle.
Michael Henry lives in Cheltenham (UK) but spent thirteen years teaching in Canada where he was first published. He won a Hawthornden Fellowship in 1989 and has five published collections: four with Enitharmon Press; the latest, Bureau of the Lost and Found, with Five Seasons Press. In 2011 he won the Hippocrates Open Prize for a poem on a medical subject. He has been published in many leading poetry magazines and in anthologies.