(Paralysis)

What impossibility shall we assay today?

Assay (I had to look it up): examine for analysis.

(How one wants to rhyme it with paralysis!)

Look at all the separated business of the body:

all its funny looking parts, the skin that wrinkles when

you crook an elbow, finger – bend your lips into a smile.

Think of arts for which some seem to have an aptitude,

a style for turning awkwardness to graceful use: say,

signing to the deaf, or masturbation, or the way

that twenty-something deli counterman is slicing up

that tubular perfection of a thick salami into thin

translucent slivers. Flesh gives me the shivers.

But I would die before I’d let another set of eyes look

on upon this grimmest enterprise: the public revelation –

my god, manipulation! – of my unlovely body parts.

Last night I dreamed my skin had been divided

into asymmetrical geometries: Sharpie outlines

slating for removal by a surgeon all of what beneath

them had to go. To be cut up like sturgeon for its roe?

I don’t know. What impossibility in all the panoply

of oddments (that purportedly add up, when

I regard them in reflective glass, to me)

should I examine for analysis – assay?

(Paralysis.) No way.

.