A woman recalls her pregnancy, when her baby sat bottom-down and the doctors talked about turning her. The speaker opens with an idea: that thinking isn't confined to the brain, and that the body is "a net of nerves," with the womb a net within it. Her uterus, she says, "knew" something she and the doctor didn't, and it seemed to refuse. Everything in her said no, so she chose a Caesarian.
The poem then confirms her hunch. The surgeons found her so deformed inside that they took pictures, and the baby could only have fitted the way she lay. Turning her could have ruptured the uterus and killed her.
The mood is calm, almost matter-of-fact, which fits the speaker's odd detachment during surgery; she would have watched if allowed. The one flash of strong feeling comes at the end, when merely imagining the turning makes her insides "flip." Her body, it suggests, was the wiser thinker all along.