Surgery, Or Not by John Cullen

It was a sort of stab, a slash and release
in the left shoulder, you know, from a point that spread
one leg to the underarm and one to the nipple,
and I wondered if the gods had jabbed their cosmic
thermometer deep in my flesh. When I stopped breathing
the pain faded, and I wound up my arm
as if I were throwing the season’s first pitch.

When a surgeon’s blade parts flesh
the initial flood of blood gives way
to the sea bottom landscape beneath the skin, where a fishy
first cause lurks in the seaweed, watching
cells go down like a thousand setting suns.
always going deeper, the surgeon probes
until he uncovers the ancient pearl.

But I’m the one who could be paralyzed,
or worse, and so I keep swinging my arm around
and over my head, limbering up, and feeling
how easily the long bone rotates in the socket.
I keep rotating my arm,
faster and faster, trying
to convince myself
I can fly.

# # #

Photo: Jon Tyson