I half dreamed yesterday’s poem
in the singsong quiet before midnight,
liquid images playing behind closed eyelids,
snug under a patchwork quilt.
Another time, I would have crawled out of bed,
carried my body through the dark,
held the alphabet in my lap, bleary-eyed,
back bent over slow-moving creativity,
and written the words given.
Another time, not after a day of moving.
I waited at 3am, Good Earth in my hands,
centuries whispering wisdom, I am also human,
Marlboro swirls collecting in my pajamas,
time trickling forward with unfulfilled yearning.
Years passed. I handed out hamburgers
and conversation to faces I will never forget,
names I never knew. I paced State St.
in a half-sized apron, first in the morning,
then long after dark, pockets full of gratitude
that I knew three Heinekens were expected
when his newspaper opened to the Sports page,
and courtesy ought always to be served with food.
I turned to meet my reflection every time
my profile passed the salad case glass, looking for nothing
in particular, and whether I, at twenty something,
shunning “higher work” still looked like the bright,
cute one. In other hours, I wrote all the words
filling my head, all but the few reserved.
Two children later, embraced in a marriage I love,
but a foreign thing none the less,
I sit in the dust beside the boxed of those years,
half in the bedroom closet, spirals piled in my lap,
rereading the emptying of my mind, the making room.
In the crawl of those written-of hours,
I knew and I didn’t know, the waiting mattered.
Friday at CTCA I had several neck x-rays so the surgeon could decide whether it’s OK for me to stop wearing the surgical collar. Today he called and said the x-rays looked excellent, but because my bone is soft due to the cancer, he wants me to continue wearing the collar until I have scans to find out what the cancer is doing inside me — whether it’s growing or diminishing, and where, etc.
So … I called my care manager to report this news and also that Dr. Alzate said it would be OK for me to take off the collar for the scans. That’s the important part, because they can’t do the scans with the collar on.
Therefore, it looks like I can go ahead with my currently scheduled return visit to CTCA: on April 19, I’ll have a CT scan and a nuclear medicine scan (full body, if it’s the same one I had in January), and based on the results Dr. Alzate will tell me whether I can discontinue wearing the collar.
The collar is my buddy, right? Right! Gotta think positive about this. We might be together for a very long time.
That’s probably all the news I’ll have to report until after the scans. Meanwhile, I actually feel pretty good, have a lot of energy, and I’m starting to know how to better manage the pain in my back and legs, which allows me to function fairly well.
Love and prayers,
Helen
Who were we gathered tonight?
Your dancing hands and perfect wrinkle lines
from years impish smiles,
his whole-face-grin lighting
grey eyes from within,
a mother, observing the roomful,
one ear upstairs where her two-year-old
plays with bigger kids (including the two I raise),
my niece, her teeth covered in braces,
half woman, half child,
taller than almost all the women in her family,
easily blushing for reasons of her own hopes,
innocent and full of wisdom
(Lord, let her stay so determined
that kindness should never be a fad,
but a life),
and a cast of other familiar friends
all determined to change the world
from a place of discord to a land of peace.
We were/are matter in human form,
looking out from inside/a soul beside,
each a beautiful mystery, even to ourselves.
Picking up onion slivers from beneath the cafe bench,
walking to the garbage, shoving the door open with my pinky knuckle,
might not be a good beginning, but it is mine tonight.
At the point of being ready for the silent noise of opening my laptop,
hallowing my poetic muse (who are you, are you many? Thank you),
I watched the picked-out food slip between wooden slats.
I did try, to ignore them there in a little pile on the cement,
carry on as if I were sure to remember, at the packing up from this solitude,
to discard my hiding refuse, but it was loud, the onion thought.
It hovered, static interference. So I’ve been to the garbage can and back.
And my muse, she is mischievous, offering only this poem(?)
instead of a ten line tale telling the other story,
of Sunday evening quiet on the cafe porch at dusk.
I can be poetic in the morning,
by moonlight, alone in a clean house,
beside a flowerbed, at a local cafe,
after a bike ride in autumn,
a walk through freshly fallen snow,
while holding a sleeping child,
through tears, to Mozart, Simon and Garfunkel,
silence.
I can write a poem (almost) any time,
(it’s what I do) but not now,
over a late dinner, behind drawn curtains,
accompanied by the chaotic noise
of a Lego movie masterpiece,
and an inner world of jumpy thoughts.
But I said I would.
Happy seventh day of National Poetry Month.
I’m content to wait.
I know all four points on this afternoon’s list.
What to buy, what to do, how to prepare for the next doing,
later, beyond this pleasant spell.
Already after four, I am aware the day is marching forward
for so much of the world while I sit here on the porch,
observing, quiet, a visitor to my own thoughts,
framing the moment in a view of barely swaying tree limbs
covered in tiny violet petals hovering over a carpet of spring flowers.
Birds sing, I sigh, and still, feel nothing but a giving serenity,
its generous offer measured breath, almost-tears of presence, a listening.
I wanted to give it to you, the real beauty, the bit of sweetness,
the way my breath caught barely when I saw the whole picture.
I love to see it there, the whole moon framed in a pocket
created by my window, lamplight, and the great living room fern,
motionless in bare tree branches, an everyday ornament
surrounded by blue night sky.
With a camera click I managed a small white dot
in a black square, a nothing remotely resembling the gift.
I’m unprepared to capture images in darkness.
This is why I’ve failed to speak clearly,
obscure in verse the haunting hours.
I have no faculty for forming the shape of things past,
a withering.
Another day, you will hear me, because I will
let the music build a craft, and on the sea of things undone
I shall sail, my oars the painting words,
then you will see as I do.
I smell everything cookies rising in the oven.
Cinnamon, raisin, walnut, chocolate chip.
I made them and I didn’t.
Measure, dump, mix, pour, shape, heat,
cool at a prompting beep.
Not till, water, weed, witness,
pluck at perfection.
My company was the dishwasher’s hum,
boys’ matters, a song recorded, roof, walls,
rectangles of light on shag carpet.
I missed sweating in the sun, sore shoulders,
dirty fingernails, blistered hands, a cooling breeze.
I now enjoy a plateful with coffee (another story)
out here on the back porch,
grateful for wordless cooperation.
“Worrying is praying for what you don’t want.” This quote and the tornadoes in Dallas this afternoon, trying to get a hold of friends and imagining what they might be feeling as the roaring passes so near, gave birth to a poem.
It is this thing that, when allowed to grow
larger than reality, grinds momentum to a screeching halt,
damns normal to a remote corner.
Waiting, stomach lurching, tears pushing,
the mind struggles to insert sense
where there is an obscuring haze
over every inch of thought.
One only gently engaged in this slowly entangling dance
with what is not desired, can be described as nearly okay,
even in the snares of attachment to outcome,
can look out on a budding branch against a clear spring sky
and accept its beauty as a gift, perspective
of a something larger than self pulling them in
to relative emotional safety, for a while,
until the next uncertainty.
Transcending completely the periodic waves
of inordinate concern (different than an impetus
to constructive action, rather a road to inertia)
for what one cannot control,
swimming only in the ocean of attentive detachment,
being a consistent positive force carrying on
unhindered and composed, can take a lifetime.
I’m working on it, little by little, day by day.
