Your body is a metaphor.
It is hardly your body at all.
The wife of an errant husband
has a metastasized ovary
even before the first motel room is reserved
in a false name for Tuesday lunch.
My mother’s father had it of the stomach.
And no wonder.
He couldn’t devour enough of what was going around:
Saratoga, Sardi’s, Havana, Harlem.
He unloosed that capacious gullet
without a thought for the result.
If I swallow this outrage, push it back
before the lips can shape it,
will my larynx blacken and swell?
If I refuse you comfort, withhold
all but the most watered-down nourishment,
will my breasts turn to gravel and then stone?
Geniuses seem to get it in the brain.
Overuse and overload,
what the heart and sex and muscles
should be taking on diffusely,
is all compressed upstairs.
Gershwin had a sudden headache,
then his vision was filled
with flashing white lights,
and Truffaut was distracted for weeks
by an inexplicable smell of something burning.