My Wobbly Bicycle, 50

I could change the name of my blog to Doctors, Ad Seriatim. I’m posting this early because today we're heading downstate, to Ann Arbor, having a pre-op consultation for Jerry’s very-big-deal back surgery on Dec. 3. He’ll be in the hospital for about a week, rehab after that. About six months’ recovery time. Another winter of hunkering down and getting better.

How will this be for us, after last winter? A friend wrote to say how glad she was to see that I feel like relegating cancer to a much lesser position in my posts. The last two, it’s hardly been there. True. I think about it less. Partly, that’s because it’s an integral part of my system, now. You don’t describe how it is brushing your teeth because you do it every day, and unless you find you have a loose tooth, it’s not worth mentioning.

Coming back from chemo and radiation is not unlike returning to the world after, say, a year in a monastery. The world seems fast and energetic. I didn’t realize how small it had grown last winter. I seemed to still DO things—wrote this blog, wrote commentaries for IPR radio, wrote some poems, had a book launch party, spent time with people as often as I could. Nonetheless, my mind was turned in on itself, the way the sick do, gathering its forces to keep on keeping on. 

These days I tire easily. I get overwhelmed even by being in a big store, shelves and shelves of stuff, mental noise.  It’s an interesting quality of tired. Not the old “I’m bushed” kind, the body feeling a bit deliciously tired, worn out from activity. It feels kind of chemical, I’ll call it that for lack of a better description. It feels like a deep inability in the bones to muster the basic elements of aliveness. Maybe it’ll always be this way. My body had a mega-whammy of abuse. Probably I’ll get some better, maybe a lot. Sometimes I’m discouraged, sometimes not.

And I still have pain and weakness in my left hip from some overuse that must have occurred last summer, still trying to improve this with physical therapy.

So now we plunge back into the fray, negotiating the giant U. of Michigan Medical Center and all that implies. Jerry worries how this will be for me. What about him? Last year was difficult for him, too, as you can imagine, and now he’s in for it again, though different.  But it'll all be okay. It'll be okay even when it's not. It's being alive.

 And who can do more than one thing at a time? First this thing, then the next. That’s how it goes. Trouble only feels Huge if I start adding into the mix a bunch of projections and concepts about it. And when I do that, it’s only a problem if I begin blaming myself for doing it!

One-thing-after-the-other is a gift Trouble gives, it looks like. Not as in balancing the scales, not as in “Something good always comes out of it.” There's not a sunny “side” to illness and pain, period. But I see there’s a recalibration, a slowing down, a reconsideration made possible by the slowing down:  What am I, anyway? And—the old question—What am I doing with my one precious life? which maybe ought to be amended to Am I even noticing my one precious life?

I picked out a poem from No Need of Sympathy that seems to be about noticing, both the tangible and the intangible:    

Birdhouse

Remember the year we had bluebirds there?

How they came back the next year, poked their noses

in and changed their minds? After that it was all swallows,

after we knew to clean out the twigs to get the house

ready for renters. Swallows or wrens. Oh, they might

have been wrens, sometimes. They might have been

wrens all along, but I like the word swallow. I think

they were swallows. That tiny slender trilling down

the scale. Wrens sound like their bodies, compact

and insistent. It was good to have either,

and their chicks. Especially their chicks, evident

only by the to-and-fro of the mothers, their fierce

judgments. It was good to have that life greet us

at the corner of the house. Bluebirds, we felt blessed.

They let us know who was in charge: blast, blast, chitter.

Also the color, the royal robes.  But the swallows,

the way they swooped in and out! Who doesn’t love

the word swooped? When they were crossing

to the trees beyond our drive, remember how we’d sit

in our kitchen chairs by the glass doors? It was so

peaceful to watch  that industry, that tiny hope

carrying on, not caring a whit about us.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 48

Years ago, when my former husband had just been hired at the University of Delaware, the then-Department Chair offered to fly me from Arkansas to Delaware to look for a house for our family. (Can you imagine that now?) The night I arrived, there was a guest poet reading. I was invited. The poet was the late, great, silver-haired Seamus Heaney. I’d read a few of his poems, but basically I didn’t know squat.  At the reception—which was quite intimate, at someone’s house—we were brushing shoulders, picking up cheese and crackers. I could have said anything, asked him anything. But I couldn’t think what to say.

During our first year at the University of Delaware, Sir Angus Wilson was a guest faculty member. I was teaching part-time there and was a grad student at the University of Arkansas, studying long-distance for my exams. I could have taken Angus’s course, but I didn’t. I think I was afraid of making a fool of myself.

 The great poet James Wright (below) spent a semester at Delaware the year before he died. We took a long walk in the woods together with his wife Annie and some friends. I remember his singing the French Chef’s song from Sesame Street to our son. At least we could talk of burls on trees, fall leaves on the stream, and Sesame Street.

 While I was at Delaware, we hosted—you may recognize some or most of these names—Rita Dove, Charles Simic, Stephen Dunn, Dabney Stuart, Michael S. Harper, Camille Paglia, Lucille Clifton, Galway Kinnell, Grace Paley (below), Susan Sontag, Ann Beattie, William Gaddis, Christopher Hitchens, Nicholas Kristof, Barry Hannah, Donald Barthelme, Charles Johnson, I could go on and on. And of course we had Gibbons Ruark, Jeanne Murray Walker, and W. D. Snodgrass, (et moi), on the faculty. I became friends with some, others not.

I wonder now, what CAN we get from other writers, particularly those who leave us awestruck?  What can we get, period, from each others' presence in such situations?

Back then, I thought it was a game of who knows stuff and who doesn’t. But no. I'm certain now that it isn’t the exchange of information that matters, it’s the presence of one whose life has been utterly given over to, to, to something—to expression, to art, to seeing, to knowing, I don’t know what to call it, but I know it when I see it, the face of complete abandonment, not just abandonment, but abandonment TO something. To something worth everything.

A comment from another great, Jim Harrison: “Though I don’t teach I often get sought for advice from young poets. I say I don’t have time for you unless you’re going to give your life to it. That’s what it takes.”

It seems that we “absorb” from others more than we “exchange.”  I may not have missed out on anything when I was struck silent. All the great and modestly-great people I’ve been in the presence of, something has passed between us that’s changed me. And maybe them.

Of course the same thing can be said of books. There’s an actual exchange. We absorb each other. We change each other. Which makes it matter, I think, WHAT we read. Which makes it matter HOW we read, what we’re after when we read.

 ●

A note: No Need of Sympathy has been nominated for the William Carlos Williams Award, the UNT Rilke Prize, as well as the Kingsley Tufts Award. Any one of those would make me pretty  happy.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 47

Some people have told me that the poems in my new book, No Need of Sympathy, feel like premonitions. Did something in me know, when  I wrote those poems, that I was in danger already? But consider how much poetry is about love and death. Okay, I’m not dead. But the very word cancer sounds the echo of mortality.

All thoughts, all images, if you stay with them long enough, hit bedrock. Love and death. We're drawn to bedrock. We almost can’t help ourselves from slowing down or stopping at a car crash, even when we can be of no use there. We’re looking for something we probably won’t find until the moment of our own death. A clarity, a sense of what this life is, at its root.

Love: the same. We start a poem by loving a leaf, or a vase, or a moment, an emotion of the moment. But, oh, what if we can't hold on to it? The more love, the more awareness of what its absence feels like. If we stay with the beloved without flinching, it leads us to where love and loss, love and death, are interchangeable. Don’t ask me what that means. It just feels that way.

I was looking through my book to see which poems might ring as premonitions. I don’t know. . . How about “I Take the Boys Up the Eiffel Tower”? In the midst of this excitement, getting to the top of the Eiffel Tower and looking over all of Paris, the thought of death takes center stage. The leap from the Towers, the moving far from the details of life we’ve held dear, the death of the bees, the polar bears, my fear of falling at Niagara Falls. We’re all suspended, swaying, if we pay attention.

If we could see time, supposedlyit would look like a tesseract, beams slidingalong vectors, sideways and inside,difficult as the leap outfrom the Trade Center Towers—you only get there by releasing a death-holdon the last frame you’ve got.                              We are on the wayup, late in the day, sun stripingthe cross-girders, the boys and Ion the second-level elevator to the top,crammed in like cattle. The higher we getthe more time’s suspended, something to dowith Einstein, something to do with distancesqueezing out details that have meanteverything to us. The bees, for example:what if we kill them off? And what ifthere’s nothing left for polar bearsto sit on?               I tell the boys about Niagara Falls,about sitting on the stone wall, my barelittle legs, knit cap, water pouring and tearingbelow. “What happened?” they wantto know. “I didn’t fall, of course,” I say,not remembering, really, onlythe photograph.               The rooftops of Paris fan outbelow. “A giant spider web,” say the boys.Spiders, too, they’ll be gone.Meanwhile, they go on stringingwebs while our sky disappears behindthreads of lights, wind swayingthe platform. The boy’s eyes get allfar away, as if the body could be emptiedenough to forget to die, or, at leastto fly through itself, god-speed.

[The top image, by the way, is a tesseract].

Is this a bleak poem? Is Keats’s sonnet, “When I Have Fears” bleak? It seems to me that the only way a poem can qualify as bleak is when it doesn’t touch bottom, when it doesn’t reach the place where love and death merge in some sort of glorious jazz, some bow scraping across catgut, some brush-stroke made of a perfect balance of pushing and pulling.

Paradox is the only way there is to speak of anything real, it seems. Not this, not this, but something that requires the two.

Of course. Those of us who write poems are fervently hoping for the tone, the language, the pull toward death and the pull toward life to be in perfect balance to sound the music of the spheres. It’s what we do, all of us in our own way, with our own art, in this precious time we have before our own personal gravitational collapse.

●

Another note: If you go to The Writers Handful,  you can read a brief interview with me by the wonderful short story writer and essayist, Patricia Ann McNair. Her award-winning collection, Temple of Air, is breathtakingly good reading and her website is full of good stuff.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 45

The hair thing.  I can pinch my “bangs” between thumb and forefinger. At the back, hair’s about twice as long. I try a hairbrush and see a slight difference. Not much, but it’s coming along. It feels like healing. That’s the wonderful thing about hair. The more of it, the better I am. From the front, it’s cute, but from the sides and back—of course I stand with a mirror and study it—it’s still plastered to my head in a way that isn’t flattering.

[None of MY hair in these photos. They're all from the book launch. I wanted you to see them.]

Upside: my hair may grow slowly, but it’s thick, as thick as it always was, it seems. It’s steely gray, coming to a point of gray at the front, whiter on the sides. Patchwork. The lower back is darker gray, the crown and upper back is lighter gray. As it gets longer, the unevenness doesn’t seem so radical.

Now that I can see the crown, the cowlick, and the growth pattern, I can see I’ve been parting it the best way all along. Some beauticians have said the part should naturally fall on the right, but they were wrong.

I do not tire of this analysis. A once-in-a-lifetime (one fervently hopes) chance to see what’s under there, like tracing my own development, hairless baby to eventual full  head.

I’m tired of the wig, but when I look at me without it, I’m not yet happy with what I see. Too severe, too wild.

It seems as if I’m slowly watching myself come back together. I am having cataract surgery tomorrow. When you’ve had surgery for detached retina and a vitrectomy, the lens of the eye develops a cataract very quickly. My right eye is all foggy. When this surgery is over, it’ll be as clear and see as well as in its original state, before nearsightedness set in.

Eventually we’ll all be in our original state, if you want to go that far! Dust to dust. I’ll settle for the original I can imagine, being what’s called well, all systems working.

All systems working: I’m planning to go to the Writers’ Convention in Seattle in February. I’ve chosen to work with two MFA students this year in the Rainier Writing Program that I teach in. And I just launched my new book. No Need of Sympathy (BOA Editions). The party at Brilliant Books in Traverse City was spectacular. The owner, Peter Makin, always makes book launches an event. He’d gotten a cake (pictured), an exact replica of my book cover.  Jim Crockett, retired from Northwest Michigan College,  played guitar and sang. Jennifer Steinorth, who’s currently studying in the Warren Wilson MFA program, introduced me. I cried of course when I looked out at so many people who’ve supported me, brought me food, sent me cards and gifts, through my chemo and radiation. I feel surrounded by love, and simultaneously intensely aware of those who have to endure this godawful treatment with few friends and not-enough love.

I’m pretty public. I was Delaware’s state poet laureate for seven years and am still in contact with many Delaware friends; I comment on poetry monthly for Interlochen Public Radio; I write a monthly poetry column for the Record-Eagle newspaper;  I teach in the Rainier program; I give poetry readings.  So when trouble comes, there are people aware of it. There are friends.

It was once otherwise. When my children were small, my marriage was falling apart, and I wasn’t yet teaching. my life was constricted, isolated. Lonely as hell.  There’ve been other times, later, when I’ve been lonely as hell. I honestly do think, as Hilary Clinton wrote, it does take a village. It takes a village to raise children without trapping them within your own narrow prejudices; it takes a village to disperse some of the fear and anguish of a terrible diagnosis. To let some others help you carry it.

Most likely this is why I’ve loved writing this blog so much through all of this. You’re my village.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 43

BOA Editions asked me to write a short interview with myself about No Need of Sympathy, to use as they considered book design and marketing. I invited myself to my study, where we talked over a cup of tea.  We both are drinking green tea these days, for the antidioxants.

Fleda: Thank you so much for consenting to this interview. I'd like to begin with the title of your new book.  You took your title from a Robert Creeley quotation, “Poetry stands in no need of sympathy, or even goodwill. One acts from bottom, the root is the purpose quite beyond any kindness.” Besides the obvious reference to poetry, I can’t help but note that you’ve just finished chemo and radiation for a serious cancer. Are the poems in this collection in some way a reflection of that?

Self: As you may know, I’d finished this book before I knew I had cancer, but it’s interesting that “sympathy” works on the level of poetry and of personal distress. There are some poems that refer directly to poetry, but no, what I wanted, what I always want, is for the poems to reach “bottom” where the question of sympathy or lack of it is no longer an issue. To reach the place where we just SEE what is—cancer or anything else might come to mind—and that’s completely enough.  There are poems about my father, my sister, my grandchildren, a chipmunk, Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, a giant puffball, child labor, Memorial Day. They’re all over the map, really. But I think they’re held together by the intent to see clearly, to get to the root.

Fleda:  Science and modern physics seems to come into your poems frequently, even the ones that focus on family. And there is a Buddhist overtone. How do you reconcile those points of view?

Self: Buddhist thought and the most contemporary of scientific thought are really one and the same. Just like you and me. Western culture has taken a long time to see what was understood by others 2500 years ago—that there is nothing solid, that at the root, reality is in constant flux, and what we believe is “true” is our own projection. And of course this is what poetry has been doing forever—at least some of it—uprooting what we thought we knew, pointing us toward what can’t ever be exactly pinned down. So in poems like “The Purpose of Poetry,” “The Kayak and the Eiffel Tower”—my goodness, almost any one I turn to—I’m unseating what has seemed to be the case.

Fleda: Speaking of family, you have a sonnet sequence, each of ten grandchildren represented by one sonnet. Was this hard to write, to avoid sentimentality, or to figure what to say about each one so that they’d seem balanced?

Self: It WAS hard to write. I gradually eased them into their present sonnet form from a looser construction. They are as much about the grandmother, of course, since the grandchildren are seen through her eyes. The interesting part is that some are her natural grandchildren, some are step-grandchildren, and so she needs to acknowledge some difference, her own feelings of difference. I rewrote several of them over and over to get the right balance of honesty and care for the delicate feelings of those who have physical/emotional struggles. And her own struggles! The grandmother has her own background out of which all this has emerged. She’s learning and shifting all the while.

Fleda: We’ve followed your father, the death of your mother, your retarded brother, even your grandparents, through most of your previous collections. Do you find any shift in this one, any difference in your approach in your poems?

Self: So glad you've followed my poems! I think—who knows, but this is how it feels to me—that the poems that originate with family stories have gotten more deeply embedded in the culture, the world, the network of science and thought that support those stories. The stories are true, of course, but they suggest a lot more than their origin to me. My mind is seeing them as a kernel in the middle of a complex of things. There’s “Building a Cathedral,” that originated with the story of my father figuring how to get the cup to rotate in the microwave and stop with the handle pointed outward. That gets embedded in the building of cathedrals, his two “sweeties” and how he copes with that, his Windsor clock, “Waiting for Godot,” my grandmother’s rooster she made out of seeds in the last years of her life. And more. I am just ranging the territory that the original incident brings up.

Fleda: You have a number of poems that deal with social issues as well—Americans bursting down the doors of Pakistanis, inequality of wealth, poor young men being seduced into being soldiers, relationship therapy, child labor, and so on. Was it hard for you to combine these poems with the others and keep a cohesive collection?

Self: They seemed to me to naturally fall into place. After all, family issues are also political issues, and how things work scientifically is only a larger view of how they work close-up. I hope the collection is like a microscope that zooms in and out, sees the world writ large as well as the fine print, but it’s all one experience of being alive.

Fleda: Is there a consistent tone that you feel as you read through your own collection?

Self: The quotations that begin each section are meant to suggest that. Yes, I think of these poems as explorations into the nature of what’s real and what matters. There are no answers, but the questions are the crucial part. The line from Jane Hirshfield is what I mean: “Art, by its very existence, undoes the idea that there can be only one description of the real, some single and simple truth on whose surface we may thoughtlessly walk.” So, if I had to pick a “tone,” it would be curiosity, combined with deep love of being alive. Those may be one and the same.  Another allusion to our own relationship, yes?

My Wobbly Bicycle, 40

Last December I wrote, “The moment I heard the word cancer, I could feel myself cross a threshold, on the side now of those who know they’ll die.”  I’m reporting to you, after nine months, including a lovely summer, that it IS a threshold. One can’t cross back over it.

Recently I ran across a poem by Chicago poet Debra Bruce (who's also had cancer) that gets at this. Others are “snug in their skins.” She can never again even pretend ennui. “Fear’s rare air” affords a panoramic view. It is as if she floats above the everyday obsessions. Yet at the same time, she plunges herself into them so as not to be “found” by disaster.

Ariel View

Shot from her life not once but twice,she slips her healthy body back on but can’t quite fitamong those friends snug in their skinswho marvel in murmurs at her return,who think that after such a flight, her drinkwill always be spiked. It’s true:ennui’s fake silks now slide right off her,but up there

 in the air, she preferredher place below in a pack of groundlings—ordering clothes from a catalog,searching for an herbalist to ruba liniment so profoundly into her fleshshe was bound by heat to stay down.

She doesn’t care if fear’s rare airaffords a panoramic view.Let daily errands run her around,and if disaster asks her whereaboutsagain, let’s say we’ve seen hereverywhere but that she cannot be found.

                       --Debra Bruce (from Survivor's Picnic, 2I012)

So, you bonk anyone on the head with the fact of her mortality and she’s going to wake up to her life, to some extent! She's going to become loosened from what seemed so immediate and crucial before. And she’s also going to be newly and sharply aware that she can’t control things.

I suppose one reaction to that knowledge may be a greater desire to control—more visits to the doctor/herbalist/acupuncturist, etc., an obsessive concern with food and exercise, a renewed devotion to religious practice and ritual, for example. Not that these aren’t all worthy and helpful. The operative word is “obsessive.”

Another reaction might be a greater relaxation into the moment: this is my life. It’s what I have, now. I never had anything more than that, but now I see it. Wally likes this idea.

In any case, there does seem to be a separation, a distance between “me” and those who’ve not yet seen their mortality staring them in the face, and also between “me” and my everyday passions, my desires, my joys and my sorrows. They’re all there, but I don’t seem to live inside them the way I used to.

Recently I had a moment of fear, and I imagined it all the way out to the end: my death. At each step, it was only what it was—not any overarching concept or ideas about death, which might scare me to death—but only a step-by-step letting go. When I got to the last step, it was only a cessation of breathing.

Not to leave you with that! We’re having, I think, the last of the summer-like warmth. Yesterday I took out the kayak, had a long swim, and  Jerry and I had a beautiful canoe ride. I spent a while on the end of the dock with a book. I’m reading Jim Harrison’s True North, set mostly in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I'm enjoying "being in" the places we visited last fall in our first trip up north.

I wanted also to let you know, the launch of my new book of poems, No Need of Sympathy, will be at Brilliant Books in Traverse City on October 12, 7:00. I’d love it if you could come. My publisher, BOA Editions,  just nominated the book for the Kingsley Tufts Award, which in itself feels like an honor. If I win, the prize is $100,000! And you didn't think there was money in poetry!   

My Wobbly Bicycle, 37

It’s been a cool summer, for the most part. We’ve spent a number of evenings in front of the fireplace in the big cottage—at one time six grandchildren, their parents, and Jerry and me (the others had come earlier). My press had sent me a carton of 25 advance copies of my new book of poems, No Need of Sympathy. The book is dedicated to my grandchildren, and I wanted each child to have a copy.

But the sequence called “The Grandmother Sonnets,” one for each child, are not children’s poems. They deal with complex emotions, often alluding to difficult situations, often from my own past. Maybe they’re my anti-Hallmark poems. I’ve always wanted to wash the sugar off my hands when I read poems by grandmothers about their grandchildren.

Our combined grandchildren are ages 9-20. What a range! I could (1) hand the parents the books and trust that when the kids are older, they’ll read the poems and be able to understand them, or (2) read the poems to them now and talk them through a bit and hope for the best. I showed the poems to the parents first, to get their sense of things. Then with great trepidation, I read each child his or her poem, aloud to the group, plus a few others. I warned the kids that these are adult poems. I briefly talked about what an Italian sonnet is. The parents are all big readers, but not of poetry, so I felt I need to help them, too.

But how much help? If I paraphrase the poem, the poem disappears. Anyway, I don’t have a nice, neat paraphrase in my head. If I did, might as well write an essay instead of a poem. This is a bigger issue than what to do for my immediate family. Teachers have this to face all the time. Shall I give my students essentially a Cliff Notes version of Shakespeare? Shall I paraphrase for them, line by line, Hopkins’ “The Windhover”?    

 Here’s one of the sonnets in the sequence. I wanted to somehow write the complexity of step-grandmothering, the sense that it can’t quite be done adequately, that all the trying in the world won’t make me a “real” grandmother to this child. And that also, I haven’t done enough, haven’t tried enough.

Joie, 7

The child’s serious brown eyes, full without prejudice.Eyes like her mother’s: part mirror, part well.The step-grandmother flies to Oregon, not to be remissat grandmothering. Ah, a child can easily tellthe truth of absence! Here in the minivan’s back seat,they find objects out the window, beginning with lettersof the alphabet, in order. She keeps on, street after street,to the tiresome end: good reader; speller, better.Knows q needs u. Knows the rule that one parentlives miles from the other, an alphabet to range.The grandmother and the actual grandfather cometogether. The grandmother’s brought gifts: a senseof continuity, of love. She’s carsick. It’s strange,she thinks. Happiness is not a direct sum.

Here's Joie, We were looking for turtles.

Someone asked, “What does that mean, “Happiness is not a direct sum”? How could I exactly say? It’s all so strange, this life in which the father’s somewhere else, the grandmother’s not a “real” one. There is a “real” one—so what am I? I guess that’s what I meant: we do what we do. We can no longer, if we ever could, add up the exact way relationships are supposed to go.

I can’t say how this all went. It was definitely most successful with the oldest children. But I figure, each child got to hear me read a poem about his or her very own self. They got to have a copy of the book. And if the words didn’t make sense, the sound may imbed itself, and years later, this poem and the others might possibly carry its weight and loving attention into whatever present there is at the time.

Speaking of the present, I feel better all the time. I’m walking two miles some days, and swimming my old usual route to the yellow raft and back, but not as often as I used to. I get cold very easily. I wear more clothes than anyone. I’ve achieved my professed summer goal—been out on my paddleboard. Wearing a Speedo cap, not the silly cancer swim cap I ordered.

I’m cranking up for fall: I have two students to work with this year in the low-residency MFA program I teach in (Rainier Writing Workshop). It’s a light load—students who are at a stage that requires fewer mailings. I’ve also made hotel reservations for the Associated Writing Program’s conference in Seattle in late February. No plane reservations yet—I still might decide not to go. (My book comes out this year, and so I should be there.) There are other trips we will want to take. Frankly, I’m a bit scared of all that. I still feel too tired. So none if it may happen. And Jerry may have back surgery. We’ll know something about that in Sept.  

I can now pinch a little hair between my fingers. There’s a widow’s peak of dark on top, with white at the sides. A lot of white. All earned.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 29

Hooray! My white count was 1.1. I needed 1.0, so I just squeaked by. I had my last chemo yesterday. It took two tries this time to find a decent vein. The first time the needle went in, but some scar tissue probably blocked the chemo’s flow enough to cause pressure and discomfort, so the nurse went to the other arm, the most battered one, and managed to find a good spot. Although today there are little sore nodules all along the vein.

I’ll continue to have blood tests for three weeks, and today I go in for a Neulasta shot to boost my white blood cell production.  I’m in the “chemo phase” now, which means I’m hopped up on steroids, ready to run five miles and lift weights, and will be this crazy for three days. Usually, the great fatigue and malaise begins a day or so after that. But saying “usually” makes no sense, since each time has been different.

This being the end of treatment, there was some hugging when I left. And my oncologist spent some time with me, talking about the future. You may remember his dire prediction if the cancer came back. He didn’t mention that again, and frankly, I know one person who had a recurrence that seems to be successfully treated a second time. Oh well, who knows?

What he said to me, paraphrased by me:

1. Walk out of here and forget about me, forget about this place entirely. Do not spend your life worrying.  You’ll no doubt start to get anxious before each checkup, but until then, eat ice cream, get on your paddle board, forget all this.

2. Okay, you say you’ll have a cloud over your head, but each year that goes by, the cloud will be higher up and lighter. One day you’ll hardly even see it.  (Lovely of him to say this.)

3. You can exercise as much as you want. Go ahead and get tired if you want. Just rest when you need to. If you can only walk a mile and you want to walk two, do it in increments.  (Okay, Jerry, you can get off my back now about “doing too much.”)

4. It seems that women who have a spiritual practice, a religion, do better with all this. If you do have something, you may find a much-renewed interest in that.  (Little does he know, I’ve had a passionate proclivity all my life. I’ve studied Christian theology, been a church elder— the first woman and youngest—an active Episcopalian, and now, as things have evolved, a Buddhist practitioner and sangha facilitator. ”Renewed” goes on every day, not just in times of crises.)

Speaking of every day, today is beautiful as only northern Michigan can be. Summer is short, so every perfectly warm and sunny day strikes like a gong in the mind. It’s hard not to be aware, when we know how a day like this will pass, shortly, and for that matter, how short life is. But we’d shoot ourselves—or in Jerry’s and my case, pack our bags for South Carolina—if we loved only summer. It’s the sharp turn of seasons, the swimming and kayaking,  gradually or not so gradually, giving way to high-piled snow, a glittery rolling landscape, sharp edges blunted, bright even on dull days.

I love to walk around our neighborhood, especially in summer, when the flowers are out. I love the cracked sidewalks and each different house, all old, some beautifully restored, some ramshackle.  I cannot leave them alone. I remodel each one, I offer (mental) suggestions to the owner about how to improve the façade, what paint colors would work better. This isn’t very Buddhist of me, my desire to alter things, but I don’t care. I just watch my mind do that and watch its delight in doing it. I spend so much time with the small details of my poems (and prose), editing with as much precision as I can, so naturally, I’d say, this tendency spills over to other aesthetics. What line-break, what verb, what paint color, what flowers, will improve the aesthetics of this situation?

I’ll report next week on how this last chemo phase is like or different from the others.  I’ll also talk a bit about what I’m working on. Oh yes, the galleys for my new poetry collection, No Need of Sympathy, from BOA Editions, are ready. If you know of some place or someone who would like to review it, I can have a copy sent posthaste, or as haste as the USPS is capable of.