Robert Wrigley

“Joint fluid,” said the physician, spilled
                              from a sprung seal in the ultimate knuckle
of my left index finger, just shy of the nail,
                              and gathering there to a “mixoid cyst,”
a substance also called “digital mucus.”
                              Once a woman with beautiful hands
said to me, “There are very few physical pleasures
                              without a little mucus.”
But when this doctor with an expensive
                              lancet lanced it, there oozed from my mixoid cyst
a viscid substance vastly more limpid than semen
                              or vaginal secretions. It was like a tear
wept by a fly-sized golden butterfly—
                              and when I touched the tiny glistening orb of it
with the pad of my opposite index finger, it clung
                              to the print’s whorls, and when I swirled it
against the pad of my thumb I understood
                              my body will never repay me
for the satisfactions I give it every day by moving.
                              O itty-bitty pure lubricious gobbet,
O most licentious and merest whit betwixt the pads
                              of index finger and thumb
slid together so lusciously the joints between my carpal
                              and metacarpal bones thrummed a hum
through every atom of my corpus
                              from this side of corpsehood all the way back
to the slither and divot of my conception,
                              which the doctor, seeing the look on my face,
closed his eyes before the lust and rapture of.