Poem to my Uterus

Clifton makes some unusual associations like Plath does, but with fewer images. In "Poem to My Uterus" there is this interesting simile in the second and third lines which I skimmed over on first reading: "you have been patient/ as a sock."
What, if anything, is particularly patient about a sock?
The rest of the poem reveals to me through the metaphorical rendering of this defunct uterus, a look at a much mythologized, sometimes domestic, sometimes magical, "women's world."
I can see a sock as a product of women's labor-- a loving, quiet process carried on in private spaces, if we want to get romantic. It is a very useful, surprisingly intimate, little thought of thing. Wrapping up the object, organ, and labor and calling it "patient," tags all of this, and makes Clifton's lamenting "where can I go/ barefoot/without you/ where can you go/ without me," more intelligible and heartbreaking.
"My bloody print/ my estrogen kitchen/ my black bag of desire." An expansion upon the theme begins with a phrase that equally echoes something aggressively primal and strangely domestic. A paw print? A floral print? A fingerprint? Likely all of the above. An identity. And "estrogen kitchen," other than being an awesome band name, alerts me to something alchemical. And when we get to "black bag of desire," my imagination takes an energetic leap to cackling women in black hats with bubbling cauldrons. Something mysterious and otherworldly and powerful. A container of magician's tricks.