Joan Jobe Smith


HYSTERECTOMY

For months I was Vanessa Redgrave
in Howard's End, languoring,
puffed up, writing my Will and last
love letters to my children, certain
that the crocodile inside me I named
Colin Clive would eat me alive, the Márquez
short story of the old houri premonitioning
her death, an omen, I was sure, but I lived,
and let me tell you it was awful, the male
GYN docs mad with positivism, like
the cheerleaders at my high school
all the years our teams tied for the
cellar. No wonder people want to
show off their scars, red badges of
courage more enormous than Appomattox
or Jupiter, paths of glory, quiet
upon the western front, catch-22,
bloody messes only men write best,
women growing used to blood month by
month, drop by drop and birth, and
how I wonder what they did with my
womanness, did they dump it in fire
or landfill? And how I wish I could've
buried it in the roots of some old tree
and watched the earth around it swell and
burp and how I am neuter, as I was as
a child, one foot on the Isle of Lesbos,
the other on the pretty calliope path
of honeymoon, and now my husband is
godlike as he slips into bed with me,
his beard Zeusian with that one grey
lightning bolt down his chin, his balding
head that of a fantasy samurai, his hairy
chest a black forest, his phallus a maypole
he dips into my October pond and we
become strange, infertile, and holy.