160 Illness poems

I let my body down slow which is what they say to do, like a whale with its breathing and floating in the ocean. Yesterday was the half moon and today was basically the half moon too. A glacier’s blue and water in the middle of a lake is blue. I only had one day during which I could get myself out into the middle of it and I did, kudos to me. And to the resilient goose who never feels cold And to the talky crow who has so many friends And to the inspiring stealthy ducks who fly together in clips above water. It’s a silly betrayal of my own thoughts to invent or remember, so maybe I’ll just close with these tender lines of Henry David Thoreau: “An oak tree in Hubbard’s Passage stands absolutely motionless and dark against the sky.”

Balmy overcast nights of late September; Palms standing out in street light, house light; Full moon penetrating the cloud-film With an explosive halo, a ring almost half the sky; Air like a towel draped over shoulders; Lightness or gravity deferred like a moral question; The incense in the house lit; the young people Moving from the front door into the half-dark And back, or up the stairs to glimpse the lovers’ shoes Outside the master bedroom; the youngest speculating; The taste of beer, familiar as salt water; Each window holding a sea view, charcoal With shifting bars of white; the fog filling in Like the haze of distance itself, pushing close, blurring. As if the passage into life were through such houses, Surrounded by some version of ocean weather, Lit beads of fog or wind so stripped it burns the throat; Mildew-spreading, spray-laden breezes and the beach sun Making each grain of stucco cast a shadow; An ideal landscape sheared of its nostalgia; S. with his black hair, buck teeth, unsunned skin, Joking and disappearing; F. doing exactly the same But dying, a corkscrew motion through green water; And C. not looking back from the car door, Reappearing beside the East River, rich, owned, smiling at last. Swains. and nymphs. And news that came with the sea damp, Of steady pipe-corrosions, black corners, Moisture working through sand lots, through slab floors, Slowly, with chemical, with molecular intricacy, Then, bursting alive: the shrieked confessions Of the wild parents; the cliff collapse; the kidnap; The cache of photos; the letter; the weapon; the haunted dream; The sudden close-up of the loved one’s degradation. Weather a part of it all, permeating and sanctifying, Infiltrating and destroying; the sun disc, Cool behind the veil of afternoon cloud, With sun spots like flies crawling across it; The slow empurpling of skin all summer; The glorious learned flesh and the rich pallor Of the untouched places in the first nakedness; The working of the lesion now in late life, Soon to be known by the body, even the one Enduring the bareness of the inland plains, The cold fronts out of Canada, a sickness For home that feels no different from health.

My skin crawls at odd hours of the day, a residual effect of my recent radiation therapies, how they inadvertently synced me to coronal flares. During my morning tea, at the gym, during the drive back home. A simple turn transforms into an avalanching pinprick of tremors one millimeter thick. I’d have preferred a suppurative response—one that collects under the skin—to this invisible, blistering, cracklesome lightning scar. One can’t choose the mood that gathers, the body’s response. The brightest moments of the day rarely correlate to a discharge. Gray sky or blackness, a foggy haze aswirl between stars and nothing halts. Some moments tear my teeth. The news feed portends rolling blackouts across the state. I read over the last of my messages: A blanket request for a plasma donation, Sasha asking if I want a ride to the wake.

Did you know I’m in this hospital bed? I’m not. I’m in the same light you stand in, much the same way I’m in the waist of your Carolina watching from the screen across the bed whose pulse is worn down with an IV to the head. We are all snow birds atop the cherry blossoms of August. Springtime in Washington D.C. passed too fast, nearly in the flash of Rose brushing her teeth over the bedpan. No adrenal gland has known such cortisol, such heartbreaking I love you O my God, so many soldiers on the brink of their lives returning! Are we still talking to the same god? I can’t imagine the heart anymore now that it presses my ribs apart, a balloon of such gravity I ache for stars in a jar, wasps whose love reminds me of fireflies tonight.

but there is no proof but proof no mark but the good news that there is no bad news yet. again. i wish i knew the nausea, its thick yell in the morning, the pregnant proof that in you, life swells. i know i’m not a mother, but i know what it is to nurse a thing you want to kill but can’t. you learn to love it. yes. i love my sweet virus. it is my proof of life, my toxic angel, wasted utopia what makes my blood my blood. i understand belle now, how she could love the beast. if you stare at fangs long enough, even fangs pink with your own blood look soft. • low-key, later, it felt like i got it out the way, to finally know it up close, see it in the mirror. it doesn’t feel good to say that. it doesn’t feel good to know your need outweighed your fear. i braved a stupid ocean. a man. i waded in his stupid waters. i took his stupid salt & let it brine my skin, took his stupid fish into my hands & bit into it like a flapping plum. i kissed at his stupid coral & stupid algae. it was stupid. silly really. i knew nothing that easy to get & good to feel isn’t also trying to eat you. • knew what could happen. needed no snake. grew the fruit myself. was the vine & the rain & the light. the dirt was me. the hands drilling into the dirt were my hands. i made the blade that cut me down. but i only knew how to live when i knew how i’ll die. i want to live. think i mean it. take the pill even on the days i think i won’t survive myself. gave my body a shot. love myself at least that much. thank you, me. thank you, pill, seafoam & bland. thank you, sick blood, my first husband dead river bright with salmon.

Maybe my soul’s all right. But my body’s all wrong, All bent and twisted, All this that hurts me so. My soul keeps trying, trying To straighten my body up. It hangs on my skeleton, frantic, Flapping its terrified wings. Look here, look at my hands, They look like little wet toads After a rainstorm’s over, Hopping, hopping, hopping. Maybe God didn’t like The look of my face when He saw it. Sometimes a big dog Looks right into it.

A small stand of trees, unremarkable. I don't know their names. They're like a knot of folks waiting for a train, or for a store to open —a gathering, that's all. They don't seem to know each other. They didn't plan to be together there in a field of weeds. Yet, on second look, they are remarkable, having stood the invisible winds of winter, stood the bitter season that comes to each alone, that separateness of sickness —mind and soul—there in the bent of trees. The trees seem to know all about winter. Seem to have winter in their bones. Perhaps someone else would see them differently, a different reflection, a family gathering, not just a knot. Some might see them that way. Some might see them differently. And I too, perhaps, on a different day. The others around me, others by the window, silently looking out —I can see us reflected in the window when the light is just right. Another stand of trees, a knot, not planning to be together here in a field of weeds.

Long scree of pill bottles spilling over the tipped brim of the wicker basket, fifty or more, a hundred, your name on every one and under your name the brusque rune of instructions— which ones to take, how many, and often, on what days, with or without food, before or after eating, impossible toward the end to keep them all straight, not even with your charts, your calendars, the bottles ranged in sequence along the kitchen counter—you always so efficient, organized, never without a plan, even when planning had come down to this and nothing more, for there was still a future in it, though the future reached only from one bottle to the next, from pill to pill, each one another toehold giving way beneath you on the steep slope you never stopped struggling against, unable not to climb, and then, when climbing was impossible, not to try slowing the quickening descent. You had descended now, your body thinned to the machine of holding on, while I exhausted by the vigil, with all your medicine spread before me, looked for something, anything at all to help me sleep. To help me for a short while anyway not be aware of you, your gaunt hand clutching the guardrail, your eyes blind, flitting, scanning, it seemed, the air above them for their own sight, and the whimper far back in the throat, the barely audible continuous half-cry half- wheeze I couldn’t hear and not think you were saying something, though I couldn’t make out what. I wanted to sleep, I wanted if just for that one night to meet you there on that steep slope, the two of us together, facing opposite directions, I, because I wasn’t dying, looking down, desiring what you, still looking up, resisted, because you were.

This was the winter mother told time by my heart ticking like a frayed fan belt in my chest. This was the fifties & we were living on nothing & what of her, the black girl, my own black nurse, what of her who arrived on Greyhound in the heart of so dramatic a storm it froze the sleeves at her wrists & each nostril was rimed with white like salt on a glass, what of her who came up the dark stair on the limp of her own bad ticker, weary, arrogant, thin, her suitcase noosed with rope, in the grip of a rage she came, a black woman, into our white lives, like a splinter, & stayed. Charming & brilliantly condescending, she leaned down to kiss “the baby,” & hissed my little princess& hushed the Jordan & set the chariots on the golden streets &Mother, I cried to her, & went out like a light.

Do this: take two fingers, place them on the spot behind your ear, either ear, the spot where your skull drops off into that valley of muscle & nerve—that is the muscle that holds up the skull, that turns the dumb bone this way & that, that nods your face up & down when you think you get it—press deeper, touch the little bundle of nerves buried there, buried in the gristle—the nerves that make you blink when the light bewilders you, that make your tongue slide in & out when you think you’re in love, when you think you need a drink, touch that spot as if you have an itch, close your eyes & listen, please, close your eyes—can you hear it? We think our souls live in boxes, we think someone sits behind our eyes, lording in his little throne, steering the fork to the mouth, the mouth to the tit, we think hungry children live in our bellies & run out with their empty bowls as the food rains down, we sometimes think we are those hungry children, we think we can think anything & it won’t matter, we think we can think cut out her tongue, & then ask her to sing.