"What the Body Told"

The World in Us

Introduction

The Editors' Introduction

Poems:

"What the Body Told" by Rafael Campo

"Mango Poem" by Regie Cabico

"Marianne Faithfull's Cigarette" by Gerry Gomez Pearlberg

"Louganis" by Eloise Klein Healy

The World in Us "What the Body Told"

By Rafael Campo
From The World in Us

Not long ago, I studied medicine.
It was terrible, what the body told.
I'd look inside another person's mouth
And see the desolation of the world.
I'd see his genitals and think of sin.

Because my body speaks the stranger's language,
I've never understood those nods and stares.
My parents held me in their arms, and still
I think I've disappointed them; they care
And stare, they nod, they make their pilgrimage

To somewhere distant in my heart, they cry.
I look inside their other-person's mouths
And see the wet interior of souls.
It's warm and red in there — like love, with teeth.
I've studied medicine until I cried

All night. Through certain books, a truth unfolds.
Anatomy and physiology,
The tiny sensing organs of the tongue —
Each nameless cell contributing its needs.
It was fabulous, what the body told.

Rafael Campo teaches and practices internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Born in 1964 to immigrant parents, he attended Amherst College and Harvard Medical School. He is the author of The Other Man Was Me (Arte Publico Press, 1994), which won the 1993 National Poetry Series award; What the Body Told (Duke University Press, 1996), which won a Lambda Literary Award for poetry; and The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire (W. W. Norton, 1997), a collection of essays that also won a Lambda Literary Award, for memoir. His poetry and prose have appeared in many major anthologies, including Best American Poetry 1995 (Scribner, 1995), Things Shaped in Passing: More "Poets for Life" Writing From the AIDS Pandemic (Persea, 1997), Currents in the Dancing River: Contemporary Latino Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry (Harcourt Brace, 1994), and Gay Men at the Millennium (Putnam, 1997), and in numerous prominent periodicals, including Double Take, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, Out, The Paris Review, The Progressive, The Threepenny Review, and The Washington Post. With the support of a Guggenheim fellowship for 1997-1998, he completed work on Diva, his third collection of poems (Duke University Press, 1999). He lives with his partner of fifteen years and "A big butch Doberman named Ruby" in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.