Seems like as good a time as any to redo
a couple of cancer-related poems, so I will do that now.
It is a strange thing to be, as many of you, no doubt,
no, a kind of--
to have a front row seat to the decline of a loved person.
So it has produced a couple of poems
that I might not have expected that I would write.
One of them is called--
it's this one, it's called "Foley Catheter."
I clean its latex length three times a day
with kindliest touch, swipe an alcohol,
swatch from the tender skin at the tip of him down
the lumen to the drainage bag, I change each day and flush
with vinegar.
When I vowed for worse, unwitting
did I wed this something other than a husband, jumble
of exposed plumbing and euphemism.
Fumble I through my nurse's functions
upended from the spare bed by his every midnight sound.
Unsought inside our grand romantic intimacy,
another intimacy opens, ruthless and indecent,
consuming all our hidden most.
In a body, immodest such hunger, we sometimes call tumor.
In a marriage, it's cherish, from the Latin for cost.