"The King’s Touch"

A Note on "The King's Touch" from Tom Sleigh:

This week’s poem is the final poem in the “Age of Wonder: Poems from 'The King’s Touch'” series. We thought it appropriate to end on publication day with the book’s title poem. I want to again thank Graywolf Press for generously supporting this project, especially Marisa Atkinson, Caroline Nitz, and Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones; Ed Robbins for his perfectionism and consummate skill; and Sarah Ingber, our associate producer, whose brilliant input week after week made each of these videos an event. I also want to thank all of you who have written me from week to week and who have made this such a lively exchange.

The Latin saying “Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli” has been translated, variously, as “According to the reader’s gifts, books have their destiny”; or in a less upbeat version, “Books go to their doom according to the reader’s abilities.” Or in a compressed version of both, “One admires, another deplores.” Or in the version I prefer, “Books share their fates with their readers.” So thanks for sharing your fate with the fate of "The King’s Touch."

This title poem refers to the ancient belief that the king, as God’s divinely anointed representative, can lay hands on the sick and heal them. The particular king I have in mind is King James VI of Scotland (later James I when he ruled over both Scotland and England). He believed himself to be deeply devout, but he was also deeply squeamish about having to touch the sick. The contradiction between the king's divine pretentions—and the personal revulsion he felt for the wounds and ulcers he layed hands on—suggests how mystery and the secular collide. So the poem and the book move between illness and healing, between evil manifested as disease and the miraculous manifested as human touch.

Now fast forward five hundred years from James’s era of healing pageantry to our era of pandemic, and you have the brutal fact of body bags being loaded by a forklift into a refrigerator truck because the hospital morgue has no more room. Furthermore, it turns out that illness isn’t demonic malevolence—it's biology, it's microbes, it's who has face masks and gloves and vaccines, and who hasn't. But the patient in the poem can’t help but wish that the king’s touch will heal him. Stretched between transcendence and the irremediable facts of physical suffering, why shouldn’t the king touch him, why shouldn’t he rise up healed!

Or not. The corporal king, after all, isn’t divine, no matter how his courtiers may flatter him.

The patient, in his holey socks and hospital gown, is even further from divine majesty. And yet as he lies waiting for the procedure to start, he can’t deny that the MRI machine projects an eerie sci-fi menace that inspires both awe and fear. As the electromagnet’s coils click louder and louder, the machine begins to pound and clang. Strapped to a moving, cold, stainless steel table, he watches himself slide toward some fatal revelation as he passes through the void of what looks like a hi-tech donut hole. It’s as if a Poe story meets modern medicine meets the heavy metal drummer of Megadeth. And when that pounding reaches its loudest, that’s when the patient rises out of himself and is set adrift in space, his body a speck against Earth’s vast curve, even as his tumor begins to talk to him—but in a concerned, gently nagging, maternal voice reminding him to pack his suitcase for the coming journey.