Sharon Olds - The Gla** lyrics

I think of it with wonder now, the gla** of mucus that stood on the table in front of my father all weekend. The tumor is growing fast in his throat these days, and as it grows it sends out pus like the sun sending out flares, those pouring tongues. So my father has to gargle, cough, spit a mouthful of thick stuff into the gla** every ten minutes or so, scraping the rim up his lower lip to get the last bit off his skin, then he sets the gla** down on the table and it sits there, like a gla** of beer foam, shiny and faintly golden, he gargles and coughs and reaches for it again and gets the heavy sputum out, full of bubbles and moving around like yeast— he is like a god producing food from his own mouth. He himself can eat nothing anymore, just a swallow of milk, sometimes, cut with water, and even then it can't always get past the tumor, and the next time the saliva comes up it is ropey, he has to roll it in his throat a minute to form it and get it up and dis- gorge the oval globule into the gla** of phlegm, which stood there all day and filled slowly with compound globes and I would empty it and it would fill again and shimmer there on the table until the room seemed to turn around it in an orderly way, a model of the solar system turning around the sun, my father the old earth that used to lie at the center of the universe, now turning with the rest of us around his d**h, bright gla** of spit on the table, these last mouthfuls.