All sight’s preconditioned, I believe.
Or maybe I don’t. But when I wandered
Into that nursing home,
When I meandered, distracted, into a bedroom
With frayed orange carpet
And lamp tassels dangling dust,
I glimpsed the dirt first and the naked woman second,
When my mind wasn’t prepared,
When my spine wasn’t ready
For the drained pale body
With its breasts hanging down
Or her flaccid rolls of fat.
My first naked woman over eighty,
And I was repulsed—
Yet, who was I
To gaze upon the gift of any body
And deem it deformed or ugly,
Unworthy of the essence
Bottled up inside it.
I believe in a collective unconscious.
I believe in a collective soul.
If I could have, it would have been incredible
To touch that woman’s flesh
As it eased into disuse.
It would have been something
To hold the slack, bulbous mouths of her breasts
And know that this is what we approach,
All of us, day by day
As the dust foams up
In the parking lot around the hospital
Where the old are fed from tubes,
Their organs executing “functions”
While we turn away
From the bleached, pale skin
And the furred black nostrils
And the dark maw of an exhausted vagina
Because we’re too tired for grace.