The Student Assistant
B.H. Fairchild
Across the street from Southwark Cathedral after reaching nine centuries back to touch a wall still standing through the London Blitz where the sign says, Please do not touch. This was constructed in 1136 A.D., I walk the path a certain medical student might have taken to Guy's Hospital in 1812 when he was buying cadavers from the grave-digger at four in the morning as the heavy South Bank fog settled upon the shoulders of the Thames, and having made his purchase in the surreptitious thick night, dragging the corpse across cobbles the way Hamlet lugged the guts of Polonius from sudden vengeance into the murky halls of guilt. This student assistant, a promising young man with a brittle future and quick wit trudging through the dingy film of the London night also wrote poems about melancholy and the sweet, throbbing agony of desire and beauty, but there he trod, pulling his burlap sack over stone and muck and stair with Southwark looming overhead like some dark god of history, pulling death into the purgatorial rooms, the terrifying, lye-washed, stinking, candle-lit rooms of Guy's Hospital. Little Keats. On his death-trip.