Poem: Restraint

This poem has appeared on this blog twice already, but this time, I rewrote it.
-
Restraint

My man had a peaked nose
and a mustache that curled down his lip,
yellowed teeth and a tattoo on his heart
of a target sign that said, "Aim here."
His wife showed me a picture,
their three children doing handstands.
The man said he was hungry,
I clapped him on the back, promised I'd buy lunch
and banged both doors open to the operating suite,
swept past the charge nurse;
we flirted, I donned hat and mask,
slathered soap from nail to elbow,
holding my arms in front of my chest
wrists up, elbows down as if in prayer.

The anesthesiologist hummed
as we took the biggest knife
and filleted the man open.
I plunged my hand in, the blood hot,
turned my head as if digging
into a couch crevice for change.
I found it, studded and chewy,
like tentacles of octopus sushi
that went on and on, furiously purple,
a cancer that grappled the soot-speckled lung,
its winding caverns, yawning chasms
splayed with nodules and growth.

"Here, and here, and here,"
the pitch of my voice higher with each note.
The other spelunker felt for himself
then demanded recent films.
The light box flickered and cast in relief
that which had deceived us;
nothing; nothing, an absence
when we expected something momentous
as if the picture of something
should be the thing itself.

Too late we arrived,
too deep for dynamite,
still I had scalpel in hand.
The other spelunker shook his head,
and in the silence, all we lost.

We closed him up,
sutures flying like gnats
fast as we could
as if we could not bear to look at this man
or his wife, or his children.