Pendulous Breasts
1.
Nothing, right?
Just two words written about me
by my doctor fifteen years ago
on the medical chart I'd never gotten to see
until I was moving away and needed to carry it with me:
a calling card of sorts
to all the doctors in my future.
Hello, it said,
Here is a woman
with pendulous breasts.
The patient who is
pendulous to meet you,
to pendulate on every one of your words.
Her pendulous breasts are hopeful
that you'll tend them as best you can
2.
Ah, there it is:
pendulous adj. 1. hanging loosely.
The oriole builds a pendulous nest.
My breasts are built by orioles then,
places for hatching. What? I wonder, what.
or 2. swinging like a pendulum.
Hmm, breasts telling time
as the pump behind them ticks.
3.
Those words fall from the shower head
in bursts as I stand examining myself,
which I faithfully do,
in addition to regular mammograms.
The bathroom becomes a fun house,
lots of clown guffaws and calliope
as I look at myself in the crazy mirror
of someone else's language.
4.
I remember my mother's breasts in morning light
looking like round low moons
about to fade into the bustle of bra and house dress.
When she held me she was fragrant and from the earth,
early summer wisteria, heavy on the vine.
And her mother's too, the one time that I saw her in the bathtub.
And my father's mother, thin and frail,
with her cotton vests and wraparound dresses,
her lavendered breasts tucked
into the folds near her waistline.
5.
I've always liked my breasts.
I used to like to show them off.
As a matter of fact they loom large
in my husband's first recollection of me.
I like the way he cups them
when I'm dressing.
One of the sacraments of our married life.
6.
Best of all, they gave me
the gift of breast feeding.
I remember thinking:
This is what I was made for.
This is the best thing I will ever do in my life.
But even then there was a flip side:
Like the time we were at story hour at the library
and I began to nurse my daughter
there at the table, behind the children
as they listened and the librarian came over
and whispered to me that I should go
and do that in the bathroom.
I snapped and asked her
if she ate her lunch in the bathroom.
and when she said, Of course not
I asked her why she thought my baby
would want to eat in the bathroom then,
which kind of left her speechless.
It's a good thing that nursing
also gives you extra brain cells.
7.
My doctor was a kind man.
He was even an ardent fan of breast feeding.
I wonder if his wife's breasts
stuck straight out like little cones.
Or maybe hers were full and as prone to gravity
as mine are. Maybe he was mad at her.
Maybe the pendulum of their relationship
was swinging away from him.
The ticking does get louder
as it bounces off your partner.
And after all it could be worse.
A friend of mine was at the gynecologist
and peeked at her chart while he was out of the room.
He called her morbidly obese.
Who knows what murderous impulse
lurks behind words like that?
8.
The technician places them one by one
on the cold black plate
crossed by thin dotted lines.
My pink loaves seem to have a life of their own
under Plexiglas as the window sinks
hydraulically spreading them out flat,
turning them into specimens,
hopefully tumorless.
My skin stretches and feels
about to crack open.
I think of blood pouring out,
leaving them spent like empty wine sacks.
Pain pulls in a breath holding wave
and gives me the first hint of what
body betrayal must be like.
I picture my mother's softness
cut, tucked and sewn tight,
the hard line she traced
with her finger in the shower
saying that there was no feeling left
where the tumor had begun growing back.
Like the miracle of the loaves and fishes in reverse,
it was, like hemlock passed around a wedding feast.
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