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—