Cold and snow at last in northern Michigan. Yesterday I went back to the retinal surgeon—you remember I had a detached retina right in the middle of this cancer thing. He says there’s some time-sensitive repair work he can do, but it must be within the next couple of months. So I may schedule that (outpatient) surgery between chemo treatments. Meanwhile, every Monday I have to show up at the hospital for blood tests. And next week is chemo #2. Geez. Still, when I take things as they come, one at a time, I honestly don’t get all in a stew about them. I find taking care of all that easier to do right now than to get any decent poems written. More of that in a minute.I’ve been reading a book of poems by Dzvinia Orlowsky, Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones, about her breast cancer. It’s a beautiful little book. There are two poems that act as preludes. Here’s one:Good WillA neighbor weaves a pink ribbonthrough our white picket fence,embellishes a bleak spot of lawnwith a sad girl copper statuetteholding a potted pink geranium.Now everybody knows.There’s something so public about cancer. There’s the neon light of a bald head, no matter how you cover it. I figure my hair has one or two days left. I’m trailing hairs like a shedding cat.Here’s the end of a poem called “Nude Descending,” (with, of course Duchamp’s fractured painting in mind):. . . . . . . Be shatteredwalking the hospital corridor, slowly,as each nurse changes her face, name,smiles and pretends to know you.Be just at the top of God knows what list,turn toward a mirror and see all fire,know your name spills like coal.Be broken in your car, watchthe light snowfall gatheron the car’s hood, disappear;dream of eating only air.Stand at the top of the stair,in light falling from the high window.Be fractured, discharged, come downlightly as the first snowfallwhite points, torches in your hand.Do you know other good collections of poems about cancer? Send me titles. I’m wary, though. I don’t much trust this writing “about” cancer as if one were on a research expedition, or as if one were keeping a particularly creative journal. But on the other hand, what can a person do but write the material that presents itself? Supposedly.I’ve been doing final editing of the (ahem, wonderful!) book Sydney Lea and I have written together, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, and I’ve been still fooling around with the manuscript of my book of interviews with homeless people. I’m a bit discouraged about giving it enough trajectory to pull the reader through it.Still, almost no poems. I'm just taking notes for now. Maybe something will come of them later.
Earlier, I did write about what I think may be going on. In Growing Old in Poetry , I have an essay about trying to get rid of a raccoon that’s lodged in the crawl space of our cottage. The essay ends this way:
Mildred is gone the next day, and has taken her babies with her. I tried to write a poem about her, about that time. I’d say it was a failure. Often the most dramatic moments, the ones loaded with narrative and image and intensity, the ones that people say, “You should write a poem about this!” don’t work out for me. I’ve written many narrative poems that seem pretty successful, but I think it’s that they snuck up on the narrative. It’s the head-on effort that defeats the poem. Maybe it’s the idea of “poem” taking precedence over the moment itself, that freezes the moment so it can’t open to the unknown. Maybe the telling gets to sounding like a braggart in a bar. Not enough reverence for the actual and true. Someday I may find that I’ve approached Mildred from an angle where she can’t see me and maybe I can’t see her. There will be a furry shadow that goes somewhere I wouldn’t have thought. That will be the poem. That will be the real Mildred.