Fool's Physic

Asclepius was said to have learned medicine from the centaur Chiron, who taught him the art of pharmaka, the use of drugs that can heal or poison. By the time of the Greek golden age there existed a medico-religious cult dedicated to Asclepius, with temples throughout the Greek lands that the Roman writer Strabo calls aesculapii. In these places the healing arts were practiced by a brotherhood of doctor-clerics. Strabo says that Hippocrates acquired his cures and medical knowledge at the Aesculapium on the island of Cos.

Hippocrates can be jusfifiably regarded as the father of Western medicine, and he stands in relation to this science as Aristotle does to physics. Which is to say, he was almost entirely wrong, but he was at least systematic.

-- Philip Ball, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

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PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF

Feb. 10, 2006

Physician, heal thyself,
wardened in the asculapis
of your lazuli, that bright
white writing chair
in the center of azures
too softly blue to name.
Heal thyself even though
your physic is plain wrong,
gleaned from that book
we know so well it always
damns us to wrong boats
on bad seas, its heavy
German font too black
and sure to swim or sing
around fool gnomons.
And so I sit here droning
on again of pharma
for blue’s afflicted
ills, my sing-song rhetoric
like a bottle of the same
old pills, resulting in
the same healed shore
surrounded by the same
qua-quintessia of curve
and fold and crash,
a paper strand no
actual seas have
lashed, much less seamed
in any salt-sussuring
way. If cures
are mixed from ills,
then I am drenched
to death by one
song’s endless pour
in the boring archons
of a drone, ever taking
me back to that
a vapid dawn so many lives
ago in which a woman
walked forever from my rooms,
leaving me to create a life
resonant of her harrow’s
aches and praising
brutal doors. And for all
the words I’ve
washed this way -- a legion
silos of said seas -- I’m not
one whit closer to those
eyes which once
invited me, over a fleeting
scree of crazed delighting
nights, to swim a depth
that only she could
sphere, for which no other
alm or dam or mam on earth
could fully again revere,
not as first and thus all.
Perhaps not like but other
tandems can cure
love’s daunting spring,
not blue but a fang’s
pent almond burnt
by ten thousand
battenings; not milk but
blood nursed from some
far savager sort of shore,
washed not by seas at all
but their cracked remits,
arroyos not Azores,
vast in their marge of
dry so leeched occludes.
When love has lost its day
a lover learns to walk away
to become some other guise
of wild blue surrenders.
Doctors of old were just
dead-enders of all they thought
they knew, leaving us to live
or die of what then sufficed
for cure. Habitual rear-enders
are one day forced to surrender
their car keys and go on in
different ways, on lesser roads
on bicycles with eyes
burnt toward dark shoals
which reef far darker seas.
Perhaps these poems will
one day rise from their
rank similitudes, having
lost the ghost of love at last,
full-harrowed of the past
& whistling some other tune.



THE MAN WHOSE PHARYNX WAS BAD

Wallace Stevens

The time of year has grown indifferent.
Mildew of summer and the deepening snow
Are both alike in the routine I know.
I am too dumbly in my being pent.

The wind attendant on the solstices
Blows on the shutters of the metropoles,
Stirring no poet in his sleep, and tolls
The grand ideas of the villages.

The malady of the quotidian ...
Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate
Through all its purples to the final slate,
Persisting bleakly in an icy haze,

One might in turn become less diffident,
Out of such mildew plucking neater mould
And spouting new orations of the cold.
One might. One might. But time will not relent.