160 Illness poems

Apprehended and held without trial, our friend was sentenced: brain tumor, malignant. Condemned each day to wake and remember. Overnight, a wall sprang up around him, leaving the rest of us outside. Death passed over us this time. We’re still at large. We’re free to get out of bed, start the coffee, open the blinds. The first of the human freedoms. If he’s guilty we must be guilty; we’re all made of the same cup of dust— It’s a blessing, isn’t it? To be able, days at a time, to forget what we are. * These numbered days have a concentrated sweetness that’s pressed from us, the dying man most of all. Today we eat brunch at Chester’s, poached egg on toast, orange juice foaming in frosted glasses. He remembers the summer he packed blood oranges, stripped to the waist, drinking the fresh-squeezed juice in the factory straight from the tap. He cups his left hand under his chin as if to a faucet, laughing. He is scooping sweetness from the belly of death —honey from the lion’s carcass. We sit with our friend and brood on the riddle he sets before us: What is it, this blood honey? *

One of those appointments you postpone until anxiety propels you to the phone, then have to wait too long for, to take an inconvenient time . . . Late in the day, an old man and I watch the minute hand on the waiting room wall. I’ve papers to grade, but he wants someone to talk to, and his attendant’s rude, so he turns his whiskery face to me: “Y’ know, I lived my whole life in Waltham, worked 40 years at the watch factory—oh, that city used to be so beautiful, now it’s a mess, those Cubans and Puerto Ricans, they ruined it.” Coiled in his wheelchair, he’s mad for company, probably scared he’s dying, * and so am I. I don’t remember Watch City as beautiful the year I was eleven, when Merle and I rode the Grove Street bus to Moody Street to shoplift haircurlers and Pond’s Vanishing Cream, nickel items at the Waltham Woolworth’s. It was an old factory town, wooden triple-deckers, water rats swimming in the oily river. Merle and I didn’t risk a furtive life of crime in our well-kempt Auburndale where we thought we were well-known, and canoers paddled the same Charles River past our homes. And I still wonder what could have vanished when we rubbed the mystery elixir on our silky cheeks? * His cheeks sucked in, this geezer could be my grandfather forty years ago, so I ignore his racist overture and agree Waltham was beautiful, as the attendant takes his Social Security card, and whistles: “Boy, are you old!” then mutters something else in Spanish. The number must be low. . . . “1936— that was the first year of Social Security!” the old guy brags. The kid forsakes our ancient history, flexes his muscles. He’s probably been listening to insults for an hour in the Elder Van, he’s bored and angry—why should he be nice? Yet hungry for a distracting fact or story, I encourage the grandfather, I want to be treated well myself some day, when I’ll need it even more than I do now. . . . My little bids for attention, my birds, fragile fluttering words, desire to be visible and seen. . . . “FDR was okay, wasn’t he?” I’m playing 90, it’s what I do to make us both less lonely, reminisce as if we’d shared the ’30s, as if I’d been there, come from Sicily or Limerick, a seamstress earning her hard living one town over. I always sat this way with Doc, years after he’d retired, his best treasure (besides my golden mother) a gold pocket watch, a Handsome Waltham watch— * a different time, when the things a person held or owned weren’t many but were permanent, a part of who you were. So his elegant watch confused me toward the idea my little dentist grandfather had some connection to the company, as if he’d labored there, a master craftsman, had been rewarded by a grateful boss. His bit of luxury, the swirling monogram on the back (which opened with a click), IR, for Isaac Rosenberg, timepiece connected by a chain to a safety pin at his frayed striped trouser pocket; another pin secured his Shawmut bankbook, deposits he’d made decades before * that I’d inherit, $214, Shawmut branch nearby the long-gone Waldorf Cafeteria where he idled weekday mornings with his cronies, also reminiscing, I suppose (although then I didn’t think of it), the Good Old Days before the motorcar, before their children moved away. Dexterity and skill gone, too, from his arthritic hands. He relished those mornings! The black-and-white tiled floor, the nearly empty tables, the Perfection Salad, Welsh rarebit, the “bloomberry pie.” The counterman. They serve an elegant porridge there, he told me, gourmet of the ordinary, State-of-Maine-ah grandfather, my Mainiac. The soon-to-be-widowed wives elsewhere, polishing mahogany veneer, or playing bridge, or shopping Coolidge Corner from butcher to baker in prescient black dresses. Old men and women so relieved to be rid of the burden of one another for a whole morning, of the tired bickering sentences of long American marriages, of pain and disappointment. What memories they’d had of courtships long since passed on to grandchildren, and half-false anyway, like studio photographs, mythic stories they could live with; now forgotten, the mistakes they’d been too fearful or devout to rectify. I miss that cafeteria, the whole idea of cafeterias, although Doc never took me, just pointed to it on our Sunday drive, repeating paeans to gray porridge, something no description’s glow could make me want. Waltham had them, too, free-fire zones a kid alone could enter with five cents for huge iced cookies, black-and-whites, * half chocolate, half vanilla, all Crisco and white sugar, chewed in gluttonous companionable half-light, wonderful— But who’d know that now? Who cares? Merle and I did everything subversive we could imagine—which wasn’t much. I’m sure I cruised Sin City in my mind, decayed old town—nowhere—but to me forbidden fruit: the 5 & 10, eyelash curlers, odd metal torture instruments I smuggled home that pinched my lids and made my lashes angle wildly up, delinquent startled in the bathroom mirror; Tangee lipsticks the size of my little finger, unflattering coral; pink girdles I’d eye furtively, wondering that I’d have to wriggle into one someday, or wear the bony corset my grandmother assured me was my fate. Oh, esoteric glamorous puzzle of the vanished vanishing cream . . . * Later, not so much later, the first day of my driver’s license, I drove the family station wagon down Moody Street and banged the traffic policeman’s rubber perch. He jumped down before it bounced the street, and yelled me over in a rage. Or maybe, he was kindly, it’s only my criminal terror I remember, of punishment fine-tuned, my ruined life, my new rights vanishing. Hardly a threat, I know now, the feckless cop. I gripped the steering wheel so hard to stop the huge recalcitrant Ford, doomed to lose my brand-new temporary license— How could I think, my budding power stripped, I’d ever get the chance to live or drive?

1. did your child lose acquired speech? A fount and then silence. A none. An ellipse between — his breath through the seams of our windows. Whistle of days. Impossible bowl of a mouth — the open cupboard, vowels rounded up and swept under the rug. 2. does your child produce unusual noises or infantile squeals? He’d coo and we’d coo back. The sound passed back and forth between us like a ball. Or later, an astral voice. Some vibrato under the surface of us. The burst upon — burn of strings rubbed in a flourish. His exhausted face. 3. is your child’s voice louder than required? In an enclosure or a cave it is difficult to gauge one’s volume. The proscenium of the world. All the rooms we speak of are dark places. Because he cannot see his mouth, he cannot imagine the sound that comes out. 4. does your child speak frequent gibberish or jargon? To my ears it is a language. Every sound a system: the sound for dog or boy. The moan in his throat for water — that of a man with thirst. The dilapidated ladder that makes a sentence a sentence. This plosive is a verb. This liquid a want. We make symbols of his noise. 5. does your child have difficulty understanding basic things (“just can’t get it”)? Against the backdrop of the tree he looks so small. 6. does your child pull you around when he wants something? By the sleeve. By the shirttail. His light touch hopscotching against my skin like sparrows. An insistence muscled and muscled again. 7. does your child have difficulty expressing his needs or desires using gestures? Red-faced in the kitchen and in the bedroom and the yellow light touches his eyes which are open but not there. His eyes rest in their narrow boat dream and the canals are wide dividing this side from this side. 8. is there no spontaneous initiation of speech or 
communication from your child? When called he eases out of his body. His god is not our words nor is it the words from his lips. It is entirely body. So when he comes to us and looks we know there are beyond us impossible cylinders where meaning lives. 9. does your child repeat heard words, parts of words, or tv commercials? The mind circles the mind in the arena, far in — far in where the consonants touch and where the round chorus flaunts its iambs in a metronomic trot. Humming to himself in warm and jugular songs. 10. does your child use repetitive language (same word or phrase over and over)? A pocket in his brain worries its ball of lint. A word clicks into its groove and stammers along its track, Dopplering like a car with its windows rolled down and the one top hit of the summer angles its way into his brain. 11. does your child have difficulty sustaining a 
conversation? We could be anywhere, then the navel of the red moon drops its fruit. His world. This stained world drips its honey into our mouths. Our words stolen from his malingering afternoon. 12. does your child use monotonous speech or wrong pausing? When the air is true and simple, we can watch him tremble for an hour, plucking his meaning from a handful of utterances and then ascend into the terrible partition of speech. 13. does your child speak the same to kids, adults, or objects (can’t differentiate)? Because a reference needs a frame: we are mother and father and child with a world of time to be understood. The car radio plays its one song. The song, therefore, is important. It must be intoned at a rigorous time. Because rigor is important and because the self insists on constant vigils. 14. does your child use language inappropriately (wrong words or phrases)? Always, and he insists on the incorrect forms. The wrong word takes every form for love — the good tree leans into the pond, the gray dog’s ribs show, the memory bound to the window, and the promise of the radio playing its song on the hour. Every wrong form is a form which represents us in our losses, if it takes us another world to understand.

After Monica McClure Ms. Nafis underwent a repeat pelvic ultrasound today the final report is not available Preliminary reports suggest a normal right ovary The left is enlarged and contains 2 separate complex cysts one measuring 3.6 centimeters the second measuring 1.8 centimeters B — Black or African-American

Weeks after ice-out, last fall’s leaves make a pathway to the lake, radiant blue and still deathly cold. I press my hot forehead to the window, smudging it. Blow and the glass steams. As if looking at a photo through parchment, I’m detached, the way I saw his body in the CAT scan from a foggy distance. I’d like to open the window, release a wounded bird nursed to health. Wiping the glass with my sleeve I see white pelicans wheel and flash in the sky.

No remembering now when the apple sapling was blown almost out of the ground. No telling how, with all the other trees around, it alone was struck. It must have been luck, he thought for years, so close to the house it grew. It must have been night. Change is a thing one sleeps through when young, and he was young. If there was a weakness in the earth, a give he went down on his knees to find and feel the limits of, there is no longer. If there was one random blow from above the way he's come to know from years in this place, the roots were stronger. Whatever the case, he has watched this tree survive wind ripping at his roof for nights on end, heats and blights that left little else alive. No remembering now... A day's changes mean all to him and all days come down to one clear pane through which he sees among all the other trees this leaning, clenched, unyielding one that seems cast in the form of a blast that would have killed it, as if something at the heart of things, and with the heart of things, had willed it.

1. DELIRIUM, AFTER RIMBAUD How many hours I kept that vigil by your side— entire nights, eyes wide, as you so sweetly slept. What I was wondering: why you yearned to evade the real. No one has prayed harder for anything. It wasn’t for your life I feared, but for mankind. Did you, in the end, find secrets for changing life? 2. DEFACED, AFTER RILKE The head we cannot know, nor its bright fruit, the eyes. And yet the body has its gaze: a lamp turned low. Or else the breast would cease to dazzle, the hips fail to curve into that smile that begets more than a kiss. And flesh would lose all life, not flare till there’s no blind it can’t see you behind. You must change your life. 3. DENIAL, AFTER SEFERIS The afternoon grew hotter along our secret shore. We thirsted in the glare but couldn’t drink the water. On golden sand we traced your name beside the sea. The wind came like a sigh; our writing was erased. How passionate our life, how full of sex and song, spirit and heart—how wrong! And so we changed our life.

Before the glimmer of his sunken eyes, What question could I answer with my lies? Digesting everything, it’s all so plain In him, his abdomen so thin the pain Is almost visible. I probe the lump His boyfriend noticed first, my left hand limp Beneath the pressure of the right. With AIDS You have to think lymphoma—swollen nodes, A tender spleen, the liver’s jutting edge— It strikes me suddenly I will oblige This hunger that announces death is near, And as I touch him, cold and cavalier, The language of beneath the diaphragm Has told me where it’s coming from And where I’m going, too: soft skin to rocks, The body reveling until it wrecks Against the same internal, hidden shoal, The treasures we can’t hide, our swallowed gold.

Inside the Northern General they’re trying to burn away a small piece of your heart. I want to know which bit, how much and what it holds. My questions live between what doctors call the heart and what we mean by it, wide as the gap between brain and mind. And in our lineage of bypassed hearts we should be grateful for the literal. I know my heart is your heart — good for running, not much else and later as you sit up in your borrowed bed I get the whole thing wrong, call it oblation. Offering or sacrifice. As if you’d given something up. As if their tiny fire was ritual and we could warm by it.

“I’m glad you’re positive.” “I’m glad you’re positive, too, though, of course, I wish you weren’t.” I wish you weren’t either is the response I expect, and you say nothing. And who can blame you? Not me. I’m not the one who’ll call you after dinner and a movie. You’re not the one who’ll call me. We both know we have that—what?—that ultimate date one night to come, one bright morning. Who can blame us? Not the forks and not the knives that carry on and do the heavy lifting now.