Portrait of the Body After Having Given Birth

All of us travel here 
in the same way, in our
own time.

The body, breaking 
through the surface,
learns that such entry 
is never clean. 

What opens may not ever
return to its former shape.
At the moment it happens,
it's aided by gravity.

And the mind, too, moves
downward toward what 
palpably hurts. 

After, there is 
the loneliness of having 
been the doorway. You are
the portal through which more 
than language has passed.

You can't take anything
back. You can call it 
devotion or you can 
call it regret. 

But it isn't by accident
that the areola's soft 
bluish flesh connects 
magnetically 

to that ocean in whose depths 
one could drown, cresting
the waves of pleasure.