The Deep, Inside

TOGETHER, WE REMEMBER THE UTERINE BIOPSIES

The Deep, Inside

Together, we remember the uterine biopsies

One of Dan’s caregivers came to attend to him and she was pale and shaken. But since she was on a contract with a caregiver firm, she felt she had to come to work even though she was obviously not well after a medical procedure. Her supervisor told her, “It was just a biopsy, it couldn’t have been that bad.” I had myself had such a biopsy, and I composed this poem to try to capture some of the profundity of that kind of pain. The caregiver agreed that this was accurate.

But we both knew — it didn’t reach the depths. Perhaps words cannot.

The Deep, Inside

As if

Your deepest self-- your insides of moist tissues and foldings

Becomes a great echoing cavern of secret passages and opening turns

And inside its fathomless depths

Is a hollow room with its ceiling lost far above in curtains of darkness

With a great wooden disk, profound in its density,

that someone hits with a mallet of stone

And the ache becomes a vortex

that sucks in every causeway, cave,

and consciousness

And reduces it to one precise focus

Of a mindless, soaring, silent cry