The The, or What We Used to Call The Change

They tell me I've paused.  I guess I know what that means. Every few minutes, the heat cranks on in my skin and I have to stand in our kitchen, freezer door open and whelming my brains.

It begins, more or less, in my stomache, arrives soon enough in my chest, and then works its way up.

Because I’ve been taken out. My womanly goods and gizmos were scooped. Now it’s me here as well as who-knows-where, and a furnace is my face.

I say to my friends, “I’m barren,” and we laugh. The whole world's my baby these days, my duty and bounty and havoc. It’s a bad way to bare, but my head is on fire and I do what I'm going. I go where I'm doing.

Why do doctors say “the”? I guess it gives it a thingness. We don’t say, for example, “You’re in the denial.” “You’re in the adolescence.” “You’re in the grief.”  But a woman’s change of life apparently warrants that nominal pop, grammatical nail. To better contain or re-frame. Just the old nervous thinking of men: women are so messy, so leaky, but after THE menopause we appear to have stopped. Meaning we empty. We clean. We windy and clear and we downright freedom and stunned. Not to say stripped burning happy and bad.

I started out ahead of everyone in school, people thought me old for my age, but then time snaked along and I variously fell, more and more behind. I’m socially daft, I’m too sad to breathe, I’m some kind of stunted I-don’t-know-what. My best poems were published at six months old. I’m here in my forties and no longer afraid of my father but my father’s not here—he’s dead. He’s THE dead. Things are not backward so much as piled together in a towering fashion, then displaced to either side.