Prostate

I hold his balls, but not for sex.
That hot laptop’s on his lap.
That’s what it is for me to love.
I think of his death
sometimes a little,
but then all the time.
I can’t protect your balls all day
and he jokes why not?
I don’t want to be
in my imagination.
I think I will collapse
like an empty pillowcase.

There was a man whose skull
was ripped open by a bear.
I think my grief will be like that.
There was a woman
whose shoulders thumped hard
against the wagon ruts.
Her left foot,
the only thing left
attached to the horse.
My heart will do me like that.

I prepare the only way I know how,
for the walk
to the places I don’t want to go,
to the roof,
its clogging gutters,
the back of the shed where snakes wait
under the lawn tractor,
the center of my desert,
the leaking well pump,
the breaker box.