A poem by Dave.
The Tribune’s survey asks me to rate my sex life on a scale
between Puritan and Gomorrah. I choose Protestant,
defined here as being in a committed heterosexual relationship
with someone of a similar ethnic profile.
Down the page I encounter the word docking, a sex act
between two men where one inserts the head of his penis
into the foreskin of his uncircumcised partner, which gets me
wondering why the only word for being uncircumcised
is uncircumcised, which is like saying uncut or unaltered, yet
there is no word for the fact that we come into life intact,
fully skinned, normal, which is how my wife and I
refer to our son when our families ask
why we didn’t circumcise even if it meant denying
various Bible passages and covenants not to mention
a pre-Victorian medical slit, where the doctor rolls back the skin
to cut around the base of the nascent newborn tip that sticks out
like the tiniest lipstick without its cap.
We wanted to save him the pain of bunk science that speaks
of preventing diseases, many of which are listed
in the twelve-inch column adjacent the sex survey, two pages
over from the story about a man who flew his single engine Cessna
into an IRS building because his wife left him and his business closed.
If someday my son flies into a building, crashes
into the office window of a mid-level federal employee,
a depth psychologist may suggest his aggression went back
to the nursery, some recessed anger because his penis was unlike
his circumcised father’s, leaving me with the image of my son
loading the cockpit, nudging up into the sky but staying low at the horizon,
squaring the nose of his bird at a steel and concrete edifice
built well before he was born.
