POEM
This Gentle Surgery
Once more the bright blade of a morning breeze
glides almost too easily through me,
and from the scuffle I’ve been sutured to
some flap of me is freed: I am severed
like a simile: an honest tenor
trembling toward the vehicle I mean
to be: a blackbird licking half notes
from the muscled, sap-damp branches
of the sugar maple tree . . . though I am still
a part of any part of every particle
of me, though I’ll be softly reconstructed
by the white gloves of metonymy,
I grieve: there is no feeling in a cut
that doesn’t heal a bit too much.
Source: Poetry (November 2009).
This poem originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of Poetry.
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