160 Illness poems

1. After the sweet promise, the summer’s mild retreat from mother’s cancer, the winter months of her death, I come to this white office, its sterile sheet, its hard tablet, its stirrups, to hold my breath while I, who must, allow the glove its oily rape, to hear the almost mighty doctor over me equate my ills with hers and decide to operate. It grew in her as simply as a child would grow, as simply as she housed me once, fat and female. Always my most gentle house before that embryo of evil spread in her shelter and she grew frail. Frail, we say, remembering fear, that face we wear in the room of the special smells of dying, fear where the snoring mouth gapes and is not dear. There was snow everywhere. Each day I grueled through its sloppy peak, its blue-struck days, my boots slapping into the hospital halls, past the retinue of nurses at the desk, to murmur in cahoots with hers outside her door, to enter with the outside air stuck on my skin, to enter smelling her pride, her upkeep, and to lie as all who love have lied. No reason to be afraid, my almost mighty doctor reasons. I nod, thinking that woman’s dying must come in seasons, thinking that living is worth buying. I walk out, scuffing a raw leaf, kicking the clumps of dead straw that were this summer’s lawn. Automatically I get in my car, knowing the historic thief is loose in my house and must be set upon. 2. Clean of the body’s hair, I lie smooth from breast to leg. All that was special, all that was rare is common here. Fact: death too is in the egg. Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat. And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet. The rooms down the hall are calling all night long, while the night outside sucks at the trees. I hear limbs falling and see yellow eyes flick in the rain. Wide eyed and still whole I turn in my bin like a shorn lamb. A nurse’s flashlight blinds me to see who I am. The walls color in a wash of daylight until the room takes its objects into itself again. I smoke furtively and squash the butt and hide it with my watch and other effects. The halls bustle with legs. I smile at the nurse who smiles for the morning shift. Day is worse. Scheduled late, I cannot drink or eat, except for yellow pills and a jigger of water. I wait and think until she brings two mysterious needles: the skills she knows she knows, promising, soon you’ll be out. But nothing is sure. No one. I wait in doubt. I wait like a kennel of dogs jumping against their fence. At ten she returns, laughs and catalogues my resistance to drugs. On the stretcher, citizen and boss of my own body still, I glide down the halls and rise in the iron cage toward science and pitfalls. The great green people stand over me; I roll on the table under a terrible sun, following their command to curl, head touching knee if I am able. Next, I am hung up like a saddle and they begin. Pale as an angel I float out over my own skin. I soar in hostile air over the pure women in labor, over the crowning heads of babies being born. I plunge down the backstair calling mother at the dying door, to rush back to my own skin, tied where it was torn. Its nerves pull like wires snapping from the leg to the rib. Strangers, their faces rolling lilke hoops, require my arm. I am lifted into my aluminum crib. 3. Skull flat, here in my harness, thick with shock, I call mother to help myself, call toe to frog, that woolly bat, that tongue of dog; call God help and all the rest. The soul that swam the furious water sinks now in flies and the brain flops like a docked fish and the eyes are flat boat decks riding out the pain. My nurses, those starchy ghosts, hover over me for my lame hours and my lame days. The mechanics of the body pump for their tricks. I rest on their needles, am dosed and snoring amid the orange flowers and the eyes of visitors. I wear, like some senile woman, a scarlet candy package ribbon in my hair. Four days from home I lurk on my mechanical parapet with two pillows at my elbows, as soft as praying cushions. My knees work with the bed that runs on power. I grumble to forget the lie I ought to hear, but don't. God knows I thought I’d die—but here I am, recalling mother, the sound of her good morning, the odor of orange and jam. All’s well, they say. They say I’m better. I lounge in frills or, picturesque, I wear bunny pink slippers in the hall. I read a new book and shuffle past the desk to mail the author my first fan letter. Time now to pack this humpty-dumpty back the frightened way she came and run along, Anne, and run along now, my stomach laced like a football for the game.

For Easton, Zooey, and Nacho Cancer loves the long bone, the femur and the fibula, the humerus and ulna, the greyhound’s sleek physique, a calumet, ribboned with fur and eddies of dust churned to a smoke, the sweet slenderness of that languorous lick of calcium, like an ivory flute or a stalk of  Spiegelau stemware, its bowl bruised, for an eye blink, with burgundy, a reed, a wand, the violin’s bow — loves the generous line of  your lanky limbs, the distance between points A and D, epic as Western Avenue, which never seems to end but then of course it does, emptying its miles into the Cal-Sag Channel that river of waste and sorrow. I’ve begun a scrapbook: here the limp that started it all, here your scream when the shoulder bone broke, here that walk to the water dish, your leg trailing like a length of   black bunting. And here the words I whispered when your ears lay like spent milkweed pods on that beautiful silky head: Run. Run, my boy-o, in that madcap zigzag, unzipping the air.

I "One Snodgrass,two Snodgrass,three Snodgrass,four . . . I took my own rollcall when I counted seconds; "One two three,Two two three,Three. . .," the drum score Showed only long rests to the tympani's entrance. "Oh-oh-oh leff; leff; leff-toh-righ-toh-leff," The sergeant cadenced us footsore recruits; The heart, poor drummer, gone lame, deaf, Then AWOL, gets frogmarched to the noose. II Old coots, at the Veterans', might catch breath If their cheeks got slapped by a nurse's aide, Then come back to life; just so, at their birth, Young rumps had been tendered warm accolades. The kick-ass rude attitude, smart-assed insult, The acid-fueled book review just might shock Us back to the brawl like smelling salts, Might sting the lulled heart up off its blocks. III I thought I'd always favor rubato Or syncopation, scorning fixed rhythms; Thought my old heartthrobs could stand up to stress; Believed one's bloodpump should skip a few beats If it fell into company with sleek young women; Believed my own bruit could beat with the best. Wrong again, Snodgrass! This new gold gadget, Snug as the watch on my wife's warm wrist, Drives my pulsetempo near twice its old pace— Go, nonstop startwatch! Go, clockwork rabbit, Keeping this lame old dog synchronized, Steady, sparked up, still in the race.

Feeling her head pick up her body, question mark, blurred misstamped question mark snakes out of   bed, trying to  jiggle unhappiness as little as possible, not to wake pain, not to raise a shade, if  raising a shade in the dark wakes pain. Under the shade the stars are awake, smiling — ready to frown on unhappiness. And the happiness of  the unconscious is scurrying already from the knife-edge of   light, pain’s night-light, waiting under the door across the hall. Dread’s square hair stiffens, her feet have corners, trying to trick the stairs out of their creaking, and the house out of  groaning before coffee, before resurrection. Death before resurrection is hard; breakfast and the stars belong first; plenty of  time to die all day when everything does groan, and unhappiness shakes itself out like a musty old mare all over the house. Dread says to herself: Serves me right for leaving home, for learning to read; serves me right for children and menopause and cosmetic surgery, and elation in gin. I must travel back through the shade and the black holes and the frowns, through drink and tampon and alphabet to the kitchen and mother and dad and the morning of  the resurrection was the first day.

Genus II. Lichen. On a scale of Lustrous to Sockeye, Fishscale to Fire-Dot. Not Ichthyosis: Lichen. Fruiting bodies in a calcareous spot. Goldspeck. Blushing. O the diffuse eruption of dazzling papulæ! Usher the Wild Lichen. Usher spring and the furfuraceous scurf recurs. The Brain-Scaled (the hairline cracked). The Blue-Blistered, the Earth-Wrinkled. Neither Strophulus nor stoppable. Like wildfire rash the crustose rush of successive crops. Tundra Sulphur, circumpolar, the snowy excoriations. So squats the Dog Lichen, the Freckle Pelt. Cobblestoned, chronic, the not contagious.

Laid out flat in the back of the station wagon my father borrowed I look up: the leaves are immense, green and golden with clear summer light breaking through – though I turn only my neck I can see all of them along this avenue that has no limits. What does it matter that I am only eyes if I am to be carried so lightly under the trees of the world? From beyond the numbness of my strange body the wealth of the leaves falls forever into my small still watching.

While spoon-feeding him with one hand she holds his hand with her other hand, or rather lets it rest on top of his, which is permanently clenched shut. When he turns his head away, she reaches around and puts in the spoonful blind. He will not accept the next morsel until he has completely chewed this one. His bright squint tells her he finds the shrimp she has just put in delicious. Next to the voice and touch of those we love, food may be our last pleasure on earth— a man on death row takes his T-bone in small bites and swishes each sip of the jug wine around in his mouth, tomorrow will be too late for them to jolt this supper out of him. She strokes his head very slowly, as if to cheer up each separate discomfited hair sticking up from its root in his stricken brain. Standing behind him, she presses her cheek to his, kisses his jowl, and his eyes seem to stop seeing and do nothing but emit light. Could heaven be a time, after we are dead, of remembering the knowledge flesh had from flesh? The flesh of his face is hard, perhaps from years spent facing down others until they fell back, and harder from years of being himself faced down and falling back in his turn, and harder still from all the while frowning and beaming and worrying and shouting and probably letting go in rages. His face softens into a kind of quizzical wince, as if one of the other animals were working at getting the knack of the human smile. When picking up a cookie he uses both thumbtips to grip it and push it against an index finger to secure it so that he can lift it. She takes him then to the bathroom, where she lowers his pants and removes the wet diaper and holds the spout of the bottle to his old penis until he pisses all he can, then puts on the fresh diaper and pulls up his pants. When they come out, she is facing him, walking backwards in front of him and holding his hands, pulling him when he stops, reminding him to step when he forgets and starts to pitch forward. She is leading her old father into the future as far as they can go, and she is walking him back into her childhood, where she stood in bare feet on the toes of his shoes and they foxtrotted on this same rug. I watch them closely: she could be teaching him the last steps that one day she may teach me. At this moment, he glints and shines, as if it will be only a small dislocation for him to pass from this paradise into the next.

I have no idea what happens when I turn my back. I sleep through everything. It is quite stupid how I never open my eyes. The carpet is luscious. The blossom at the window is spectacular. I try to keep them apart. There are more grown-ups than I know what to do with. I have a different Darling for each one. I inflect it. I miss everything — the haunted wardrobe, the bald landlady, the slurring woman crashing up and down the stairs, Look after her, Look after her, Pierrot with his little spoon.

When she came to visit me, I turned my face to the wall— though only that morning, I'd bent my head at the bell and with the host on my tongue, mumbled thanks. Cranked up, then down in my bed— I told the nurses jokes, newly precocious, but too old at twelve to be anything but a patient. I slouched in my robe among the other child-guests of St. Joseph, the parrot-eyed scald masks, the waterheads and harelips, the fat girl with the plastic shunt. The old crippled nun on her wheeled platform dispensed her half-witted blessings, then was gone like the occasional covered gurneys sliding by my numbered door.Gone told me I'd go away too— orderly as dusk in the brick courtyard: the blank windows curtained one by one. I could not abide that yearning face calling me home. Like the Gauls, in my penciled translations: I saw Caesar was my home. Through the streets of the occupied city, his gold mask rose, implacable. In the fervent improvisational style of the collaborator— I imagined pain not as pain but the flickering light embedded in the headboard, the end of the snake-wire uncoiling from the nurses' station. The painkiller winked in its paper cup, its bleak chirp meant respect should be paid for the way I too wielded oblivion, staring at the wall till six, gifts unopened in her lap, the early dark deepening between us.

for Laura The island, you mustn’t say, had only rocks and scrub pine; Was on a blue, bright day like a blemish in this landscape. And Charlotte who is frail and the youngest of us collects Sticks and branches to start our fires, cries as they burn Because they resemble most what she has lost Or has little of: long fingers, her toes, And a left arm gone past the elbow, soon clear to her shoulder. She has the mouth of sea perch. Five of our sisters wear Green hoods. You are touched by all of this,but not by us. To be touched by us, to be kissed! Sometimes We see couples rowing in the distance in yellow coats. Sometimes they fish with handlines; we offend Everyone who is offended most And by everything and everyone. The five goats love us, though, And live in our dark houses. When they are Full with milk they climb the steps and beg that They be milked. Their teats brush the steps and leave thick Yellow trails of fresh milk. We are all females here. Even the ghosts. We must wash, of course, in salt water, But it smarts or maybe even hurts us. Often with a rope Around her waist Anne is lowered entirely into the water. She splashes around and screams in pain. Her screams Sometimes carry clear to the beaches on the Cape. For us I say so often. For us we say.For us! We are Human and not individual, we hold everything in common. We are individual, you could pick us out in a crowd. You did. This island is not our prison. We are not kept In; not even by our skin. Once Anne said she would love to be a Negro or a trout. We live without you. Father, I don’t know why I have written You all this; but be proud for I am living, and yet each day I am less and less your flesh. Someday, eventually, you Should only think of me as being a lightning bug on the lawn, Or the Negro fishing at the pond, or the fat trout he wraps In leaves that he is showing to someone. I’ll be Most everything for you. And I’ll be gone.