Meningioma—a tumor that forms from the meninges, the
membranous layers surrounding the brain and spinal cord.
Don’t start with that don’t-you-love-your-body stuff.
I’m not going to cut you out with the Gamma Knife, just stunt you a little,
the way cigarettes and masturbation were said to do.
I’ve loved you plenty. For the twenty years that I knew you were there
and for god-knows-how-long when you hid at the base of my brain,
throughout it all, you’ve been taken care of fine.
And you’d be fine today if only you hadn’t set off medical alarms
by numbing my hands and making me fall and causing the doctor
to fear I’d suffered a stroke. All in all, I think I’ve been pretty patient—
feeding you, making you comfortable, carting your waste away.
Love my body! Some might say I love it too much.
Putting it above everything but love itself because I see mind and body as one.
And frankly, my body was pretty sexy when I was younger
and learned to ignore the disparagement of my stumpy, peasant legs,
my bulbous nose and my arches fallen flatter than Coventry Cathedral.
True, I’ve never been to a gym or tried to make my physique pictorial.
I loved it as it was. The crooked spine, the bulging tummy.
I remember the first time I saw you floating in a murky MRI,
your shadowy body like a fetus in a sonogram,
an innocent pea-sized blob nestled against my brain stem.
My heart skipped a beat when they said you were benign.
It wasn’t love, not at first sight, but a definite affection.
But look at you now, geometrically larger, gangly with—
what are they, ganglia?—root-like appendages
that I’m told are beginning to bully the other organs,
shoving arteries out of your way,
stretching a cranial nerve almost to the breaking point.
My brain, I have to say, has been really tolerant,
willing to adjust and give you room.
Even pinched as it is, the brain stem’s been slow to anger.
But there’s just so much a medulla can take before it starts to swell.
It’s about boundaries, dude. If you’d have respected them,
you could have stayed untouched forever. That’s how much I love you,
and even now I’m not going to eradicate you.
I just have to keep you from getting any larger.
It’s time I leashed you in, muzzled you, and shown you who’s boss.
Let’s face it, you’re a dog who has outgrown his thunder shirt.
Listen, dog, the storm approaches, and soon the lightning strikes.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 3.
David Bergman is the author of three full-length books of poetry, the latest being Plain Sight, (Passager Books 2023). He edited John Ashbery’s art chronicles Reported Sightings and the anthology Gay American Autobiography, as well as many other books. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, and the Yale Review among many other places.
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