Roy Bentley
Umbrella
It’s, you know, that true love thing.
Divorced but friends. Still pretty tight.
So just fine with being here with me.
At the office of a urologist in Ohio.
If she has a “tell” (that she loves me),
this morning it’s her looking away
before the needle enters my penis,
a needle preamble to an anesthetic.
A catheter isn’t a torture device—
if the health care worker fitting you
is skilled. This nurse knows her stuff.
Knows about male pride and a penis
turtling. And laughs, wisecracking
there are times that you just want
to hide from the goddamn world.
Anyway, that is something you
don’t count on: how ashamed-
tired you are. And how the fact
of a loved one looking away is
a small mercy. An act of grace
that includes being so distracted
by my suffering she leaves behind
a black, folding umbrella that had
saved us from a late-spring rain.
Roy Bentley is the author of Walking with Eve in the Loved City (University of Arkansas Press, 2018), winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize; Starlight Taxi (Lynx House, 2013), winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize; The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine, 2006), winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize; Any One Man (Bottom Dog Books, 1992); and Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama, 1986), winner of the University of Alabama Press Poetry Series Award. His poems have appeared in RATTLE, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, december, North American Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere.
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