Imparting the huge news in superstitious whispers, 
smiling, serenely self-satisfied yet somehow sad, 
anxious fingers feeling for quickening wombs, 
declaring themselves officially ecstatic to be enceinte, 
anything but ambivalent, husbands tumid with conceit, 
yet underneath the paeans a hushed note of defeat.  
  
They swell, consuming space and food, their gravity 
growing ever more gravid like planetary giants 
in stately orbits, devoted Ganymedes tending to 
their hankerings, mammoth goddesses of nonce-cults 
processing majestically through trimesters like fraught
argosies, doing everything the books say they ought. 
  
Some sail into harbor, plus-size panoplies with 
topgallants unfurled, sure of admiration, vaunting 
and mansion-stolid, immune to all mischance; 
others, like cats, seem driven to secrete themselves 
until the deed’s done, turned inward as if seeing 
a pristine way to love a pristine being. 
  
Indulgence, sympathy, supportively mewing 
over vanished ankles and multiplying chins, 
never asking about the deep, the endodermic fear, 
my duties are both contradictory and clear: 
to admire without resentment, envy without disgust, 
feigning sorority while they bear what they must.
                        

A woman is not a cello
nor a peacock a Frenchman;
nevertheless, faces may be kindly
and ribbons solacing to scratch.

One apple orchard Sunday started
soaked in cadmium yellow air;   
by noon, a pillowy Prussian blue, 
with bouncy duckling children
squealing twelve-tone pastorals;    
then evening, an iced blanc-de-blancs,
ending with tipsy grown-up Ph.Ds  
plucking moonflower impressions   
from a day defunct as the last dynasty.

A woman is not a cello
nor life a penitentiary;
all the same but all the same,
hair falls like Vesuvian cinders,
jowls thicken like crab bisque,
and memory plays musical chairs,
grifter tricks among scarlet synapses 
whose bosons weigh nothing at all.
It’s as bad as that, you say, as bad as that.

Still, I insist, one woman was a cello.