You on a Table in Someone Else’s Hands
In the cab, you turn pink from the streetlights checkering the window.
Just as palpable, you grow inner-blue with hush, staring somewhere
beyond the moon. Post-surgery, wrapped in a massive scarf,
sunglasses on, you fall suddenly asleep. I have no choice but to watch
the world—it reflects off your dark lenses, a glittering that dims
then sparks again. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned in thirty-five years
it’s: if this is how it must go, it will. You breathe & we are one buoy
on the vast water, your breath uplifts me, your sleep rests my bones.
Captaining your breath, it’s clear the heartbeat is a comma. Grogged up
& numb in your hospital bed, you waved as if from across the sea,
“come here.” I was already here. While they opened your
breast, I sat down the street at Grey Dog, chewing a sloppy BLT
I wouldn’t finish, trying to siphon my mind away from you on a table
in someone else’s hands. We leave your seatbelt off to let the stitches
spider-webbing your nipple breathe. Wherever you were on that table,
now you’re speckled in sun & shadow, there’s no other way
to say it: life loves you. All I did—all I can do—is witness,
comma after comma after comma, & sometimes point “this
way,” so the driver turns down Flatbush while your eyes
open, as if for the first time, to flood the cab. You see
& the miracle of it—with each blink, your eyelashes
bow, rising only to bow again. Your brown-black irises, wet
& muscular as a horse’s back, effortlessly
take it all in. I want to brush my hands over such
seeing, just as the almost-evening takes a ride
on your seeing. Soon the street will be black & loud with boom
-boxes & swerving delivery bikes. You’ll see that too. Propped up
in our bed, slurping takeout, you’re alive: a fact. But only a fool
would concretize you, so I put away all futures & swim beside you,
your heel in my mouth, someone is laughing, who
can tell who, as inside your breasts the cysts
will or won’t. When your eyes meet mine, all commas flutter, all
rules undo, buttons unbutton, & the roof across the street breaks
into birds—
