A Nothing to Do with God

1996, at the bus stop, my friend, mouth brown with Marmite
          and the paler brown of nicotine,
dressed up for the last, non-uniform, day of term
          in a Kappa tracksuit brought back from Zante,
electric blue with silver trim, asked hadn’t my dad once
          been a pope or something?

***

I liked the idea of the Sistine Chapel, that it had been larger
          than Michelangelo’s life. Larger than
a football pitch. Too large to take in? I asked my father,
          wanting him to nod his head solemnly.
It’s still a general rule, that things should be larger
          than they are here, him older then

than he is now. And what an idea
          that a day could be ruined. The morning was still
as it had been before I kicked my sister
          under the train table coming home
from the old bombed Coventry Cathedral. In the new one

          there is a photograph of two charred beams
that fell in such a way as to resemble a crucifix.
          And there is the crucifix hung on the wall
like one charred beam fallen on another.

          My father said nothing to do with God
but looked intently towards nothing in particular
          above the altar as he gave us coins
to drop in the model of the cathedral
          inside the cathedral.

***

Not yet thirty and already a star, Andreas Vesalius
          renounced the study of anatomy.
No longer should I willingly spend long hours
          in the Cemetery of the Innocents
turning over bones, nor to Montfaucon to look at bones.
          Nor should I care to be locked out of Louvain
so that I might take away bones from the gibbet.

          But he could not entirely stop
and never failed to visit any nearby medical school,
          nor to inspect the bodies on the battlefield.

***

My father hitch-hiked to Israel in 1960
          and took notes. As the train pulled out
of the station, he realised that his bag was gone.
          Would he still have become a priest,
and then not one, he asks me, if he had returned
          from Israel and Naples and Belgrade
with his notebooks – if he had
          had, after repatriation from Rotterdam
by boat, his own account of himself?

***

          Bound for Venice, after his trip
to the Holy Land, the reasons for which are lost,
          in 1564, a storm took apart his boat
and with its remains Vesalius was washed up on Zakynthos,
          the island on which the tar was dredged
that failed to protect the ship, and which is known now
          by British tourists as Zante.

Where precisely he landed is not known, nor do we know
          where he was buried, by whom.
There seems little doubt, at least,
          that this was in the month of October.