The Study of Medicine
By Gabriel Welsch

In June 2000, the Journal of the American Medical Association
published a German study which concluded that a man’s over-all
health improves if he stares at the breasts of a well-endowed woman.

In a hospital green cafeteria built in the 70s,
professors at tables like great icebergs
sit transfixed by a Destiny’s Child video
as if it were a car accident without survivors
rather than the near-lewd health
of nipples under thin clothing, the push
of breasts against glossy film.
According to German physicians
this is healthy. This is health renewed.

The men don’t look it. They frown at coffee
during the commercial, shuffle papers
in mottled hands, wear ties in a permanent
slouch at the neck. One of them wonders aloud
to a colleague if women’s health is improved
by staring at a man’s cock or the package
of his ass. After all, speculation is what they
are about, the will-she or won’t-she question
as well as all things ontological, all things
hermeneutic.

Paul is there, as am I. He shows me
a photo of Wanda, and she is nude,
her back to the camera, her posture
making it clear she assumed she was alone.
Her shoulders hold up nothing, work
at focusing on nothing more than drying.
A net of droplets drape her left shoulder,
next to the rope of hair tight with water.
He is expressly showing it to me
so that I do not stare. He does want me
to look close, to talk to him about light
and whether he has captured it as he wanted,
whether the image is of a kind. But I can’t
think about light. Not with this photo.

He shows this photo to me—
for the first time ever—when he knows
the marriage will end. When he
knows she has had an affair and has always
felt distant from him. She has claimed
he is abusive, that she has never felt comfort
with him. She has never told him any of this.
She says it is because she felt distant.
This picture is about little else. And it is not
about exposure, intimacy, or privilege.

This poem should not describe the photo.
That is the photo’s job. But it is not
her front, and only the top of her ass
is visible, a sheen of water on it,
haunches shaped like a box. It is not slick
with light. Around us, the professors
are again bemused, this time by Limp
Bizkit and another roiling sea of breasts
caught in a slow motion roll, the health
of the room near glowing, except in the man
next to me, whose eyes remain on the shoulders
of his wife, in a photo whose look has
changed, almost as the light has become more
gray with winter. He won’t stop looking.