After the Mastectomy

After the Mastectomy

Let’s have the honest muscle

of it, soft or not.  It all depends

on how you bend to get to work:

the curve and turn from the inside bi-

cept to the slackening lack of breast, the chap

at the center after days of cold.

Let’s remember the first time it’s

touched vs. the first time you want it

to be.  The way he’d said thrust

is all need and I said no honey, it’s more

than that.  It’s something that steadies

the intention and it’s what you see, really see,

when you peek into the bucket: is it

water or stone, oats or the barren alone?

I know my spine will zip the vision in different

places along the once fast now slow nerves, knowing

what it has left to lift.  I know that zip

looses a few teeth, has a few pulled,

chips one or two,  coaxes the rest

to hold on, like a lover’s insightful stroke up under

the bone as if there were no skin.

God help me these days getting up

is barn work, is hauling the eighth set

of lobster traps before I even put my boots

on.  Is the grind of the tractor seat

or the sigh/glide of the biscuit cutter

in the dry dough before breakfast.   And although

the first time I saw him seeing me seeing him

I was afraid, after all this work it’s come

now to this: the curve now’s as straight

a line as sky, straight as the i.v. tube they use

to keep my blood company.  When, under

that breast I touched and touched

a stranger found the small round ball

I thought God I thought but that’s mine

I left it there tucked in the dark for his

lips to find.  How is it fingers, cold impotent

tips, insist its theirs and lay claim?

Shit.  I can’t say.  But not it’s gone it’s given

me more this way anyway.  It’s moon always

dark.  It’s Jupiter’s swirling cataract eye.  It’s

the tip of his tongue coming up to the ridge

of the fault and not pausing not one bit when

it’s all gone.  It just keeps on keeping on

getting going, over the leveled

chest and into a new, different, calmer

barn, where the hay’s fresh in and warm

and the shit’s cleaned and out and we’re all,

both of us, ready for a lie-in.