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Last Supper for a Breast
Technical magic brings electrical pulses
to my telephone’s tympanum,
etching its vibrational thrum
onto my left ear’s tympanum,
I hear the words
“breast cancer --- stage 4”
-- Words that are a storm;
collapsing neighbouring tympanic bones,
their ragged edges tearing at my mind,
stimulating panicked imaginations
of the falcon not hearing the falconer;
of hopelessly herding malignant hoards
back, back, from their travels
through her pulsing vessels,
back, to return from her interstitial spaces
disfigured by their icons of death,
malicious graffiti,
no phagocyte can remove.
In the eye of the storm I see
the body of a woman I love
echoing the bodies of all women
who have fallen likewise before her,
conquered by those malignant hoards.
In the eye of the storm I see
the body of a woman I love
echoing the body of nature,
writhing under the pain of malignant,
unmediated reason
and scientific determination
by which our species hope to conquer her;
greedily claiming her body
as their stockroom,
as amphitheatre for their lust,
as refuse pile for their shame and sins.
The storm is now a howl, I recall
reading how a cell becomes cancerous
when it loses its ability to communicate with other cells,
and wonder how it is that our species is the one cell
that will not communicate with the others;
ignoring the energetic dialog of the body of nature;
the energetic dialog of the cosmos moving through her,
our birth mother.
The storm recedes, I plan
to make a last supper for her breast,
imagine the sumptuous table I will lay for our repast
before the will of the surgeon’s knife is done.
I can no longer imagine Easter.
The storm is gone, I rest
in my garden, winter killed,
against the stone I once, with jest,
named the breast of nature,
and speak my heart.
Best beloved,
I first knew the essence of you
at your breasts,
while nursing on your generous love,
my lifeblood proliferating
until my marrow ached,
causing me to cry,
“I am sated,”
knowing I would return
to their eternal beauty.
At your breasts,
best beloved,
my eyes have feasted
on the landscape of your face -
its brilliant brow o’er hanging
morning sky eyes
and finely arching nose,
its form coherently echoing
the slope of cheek and jaw,
framing that red petalled entrance
from which emerge oracles of wisdom
that you have shared in communion
with the ruined ones.
And I am grateful for my fortune
to have been counted among them
lest I’d have never touched the beauty of you.
At your breasts,
best beloved,
I have learned to nurse on the mysteries
of eternal milky wisdom,
illuminating the tracings of my destiny
enfolded by Nut’s midnight sky belly.
At your breasts
Best beloved
All crying stops
To listen to the rhythm of the cosmos.
Thus, I find myself weeping
to imagine your one breast in a tiny tomb
wearied to death from its labours,
suffering to be apart from your essence.
In my imagination I kiss it to rest,
thanking it for its labours,
wondering, had I needed it less
would it have lived;
had I never known it gifts
would I have lived.
At your breasts
Best beloved
All striving stops
To listen to the rhythm of the cosmos.
January 31, 2002
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