Male-to-Female

1
Doctor gives her the analogy of sex-change as a sea voyage
(so camp). She must set sail from her old house of god
that doesn’t want her now (despite its unmarried men in dresses

and Christ as exquisite garçon fatal, more Mary than a mary
could hope for). So there is the man she was, tanning
on a deck chair in the sun. She can consider him

at a distance already, see him proffer his unrequested body
to the higher authority (He who must be wearing a little black
dress-sense of comedy). Halfway there his heart sinks irretrievably,

his face posthumously burning. To the other side of the world
one is cast not called. At the railing is the woman she is,
beguiling under parasol, stealing looks at her breasts

but passing successfully still. The sails clouding, man-o’-war birds
arrowing as the New World appears apparitionally. The émigrés
clap their hands above their heads: a flock of jewelled seabirds

or a long prayer unwound. The dead man is disembarked first
through the fog. Captain approaches her (with Doctor’s lovely
bone structure) and says: his body is entrusted to you, m’lady.

2
Centuries after Galen, her penis finally unblooms on the inside,
a timid resurrection of space that tried to mend like a sore
until she taught the flesh what is right, the good Christian

she might’ve—. The orchidectomy was a deflowering of sorts,
a relic of woman was found, always so, almost petrified.
She learned not to hold her breasts possessively.

The pain of mother in labor and baby cruelly worlded—
combined. To flesh out the sentient dress that always hung,
perfect-postured, just out of the mirror’s line of sight,

the shrinks wanted her to write an autobiography.
She gave them the authoritative biography of a man who died
from a chronic lack of inside. Like an angel she delivered him from.