Fertility

Today I'm feeling fertilized by an egg -- if you imagine those, as we started to: ova and sperm -- then you wonder how many remain in us; each ovary, its own little purse, still presses one of her minks out to the vastness, through space, to the fluted arms of the fallopian tube to the uterus to the placenta to the cervix to the OB tampon. The blood stops there; the basket fills with roses. How many months, how many years until the last egg makes her solo promenade? Since menarche at 14, 360 ova have left my body, without a sigh or complaint, without rejection. Each she leaves her culture, her club, her coterie, and enters heaven, a near-hit virgin, loved yet never "barren."