My Wobbly Bicycle, 33

This month is my “baby” sister (14 years younger) Michelle’s time at the lake (she owns 1/3 of the cottage, I own 2/3). She said that since she wasn’t able to visit when I was having chemo and radiation, she wanted to give me a lake-spa weekend.  She’s new to yoga this year, passionate about it, learning moves and practicing the techniques of “healing yoga” for herself. I had a session every day on the upstairs screened-in porch, waves lapping below, incense burning, woo-woo music on Pandora, and a little sister who loves me. If anything can cure a body, that ought to. Touch makes a huge difference, I think, not just when we’re sick. A masseuse is good, but someone who loves you is even better.

AND, I finally got in the lake!  I swam my usual swim to the boathouse three cottages down and back. We’ve always claimed the waters of our lake are the North American Lourdes, so I guess I’m doubly “cured.” But I have to say, my poor muscles are weak. It was a simple swim, breast stroke, not far, but it registered all over my body. Still does.  

I put on my swim cap ordered from one of the cancer sites. It’s white and ruffled and comes down over even my ears. It’s dopy. I look like Esther Williams. Michelle said something like, “Oh for Pete’s sake, take it off.” So I did. Here’s a photo, from a safe distance, but I put the cap back on when there were boaters or neighbors. And the photo Michelle took of the two of us, up close, my head shining in the sun? I can’t quite show you that one. I’m shy, obviously, about my head.   

I know, I know, a lot of young (particularly) people parade their bald heads around, an act of defiance of the disease, a statement that they feel okay no matter what they look like. I’m okay being bald, but I don’t like to be stared at, or have eyes drop when they see my head. I’m private. I’m okay with that.

I have days when I can walk over a mile, other days, like today, when I feel that chemo-y sick feeling and every movement is an effort. There seems to be no clear cause of either. My body just oscillates between okay and not-okay.

I feel somehow deficient that I haven’t been turning out poems about the cancer.  Other people have written really good poems about it. Though I’m reminded of what I said in my essay, “Mildred,” in Sydney Lea’s and my book (Growing Old in Poetry, on Kindle  from Autumn House. Ahem. Also a short version on Brevity’s website): you have to see things slant, you have to wait until they insinuate themselves in when the eyes are turned elsewhere.  I’d tried to write a poem about my adventure with Mildred the raccoon, but it was a failure. I’ve tried to write poems “about” this cancer experience. I only like one or two of them, if that.

“Emotion recollected in tranquility,” says Wordsworth. I say, if it’s tranquil, it’s lost its punch and you might as well not write it at all. However, if you let it sit, it will attach itself to the shirttail of some new  urgency and both will be charged by it.  Why did WW say “recollected”? Anything written about is recollected. “Tranquility” because almost certainly there’s much more to the poem/essay/story than the present scene yet knows. There’s a breadth and depth to be brought to bear upon it. There’s an assimilation that, if it happens, opens the door of the experience to let in the whole of our lives.

This relates to privacy, too, I think.  If we scatter ourselves all over Facebook, if we don’t allow enough pulling-back time, if we release every experience immediately into the general churning vat of conversation, OR (Ahem again) onto our blogs, how can we absorb, assimilate, and “see” what’s there? I’m not talking about making meaning of it, which is more akin to preaching than to writing. I’m talking about seeing by staying with it, by continuing to watch what emerges instead of quickly ossifying it into language, photos, and emoticons.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 27

Another effort to find a cooperative vein yesterday. Two tries this time. Did you know that warming the arm makes the veins easier to find and penetrate? The trivia I’m learning.

This was for a transfusion of one unit of red blood cells. I got to the hospital at 10:45, as requested, but the actual transfusion didn’t begin until after 1:30! They had to send a vial of blood to be typed and cross-checked for antibodies, and apparently the lab was slow that day. It was 3:50 and I’d read half The Marriage Plot before Jerry picked me up.

I’m supposed to feel perkier by this afternoon. I’m exhausted this morning. I think yesterday made me tireder than I thought. The waiting, the searching for a good vein—and on top of it all, my dear brother-in-law was having one of the most complicated and serious surgeries there is, at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor. It’s called the Whipple procedure, and is to head off incipient (or early stage) pancreatic cancer. They removed one-third of his pancreas, part of his stomach, gall bladder, duodenum, and bile duct. He’s doing well, by the way, and the tests so far haven’t shown active malignancy. Hooray for that.  

Two things occur to me. One is how, since we don’t die young so much these days from the old diseases, we can grow old, and suddenly all around us is illness and the sorrow of illness, barely staved off by modern medicine. This is so true in my family the last few years that it feels almost traitorous to turn away into my own work. That really isn’t the issue, though. It’s how to be with illness. Based on my own, I’d say—and have said, forgive me for repeating—the best thing we can do for each other is to be emotionally present. Not leaning toward identification, which is smothering, and not leaning away, which is escaping. Just being there.

It may be possible to avoid burnout that way. Although if we care, there’s bound to be a point where we just want to get the heck out of there and live our own lives. What can we do but recognize that? We’re human.

The other thing is the writing. I’ve written a few poems that concern themselves with my sister’s surgery for a brain tumor, her stroke afterward, and the long, slow recovery which has not at all been a full recovery. There’s a necessary objectification in this that feels like betrayal. How can one dip into someone else’s deeply personal and indescribable suffering and bring it to words?

It’s not any different, is it, from writing deep into anything we don’t know? What DO we really know?  But in this case, we’re carrying our imagination down into someone else’s territory. Which as writers, we can’t help doing. HOW we do this, I’d say, is what matters. We don’t want to usurp the pain for ourselves. There’s a respect we need for this: possibly the subjunctive, possibly a third-person removal, possibly a disavowal in the work, of our ability to really know. It may require the same emotional  “not leaning” I mention above.

What would that leaning look like? Emotional identification would look like “me,” overlaying myself on “you.” My students have given me some of the most amazing “interpretations” of poems that have nothing to do with the poem. It’s all about what’s going on in their heads. Reverse that as a writer and that’s what I’m calling identification. Not seeing what’s actually there. Happens a lot in some successful writing, but maybe not in humane and accurate treatment of those we care about.

Leaning back too far, escaping, is easy to spot. You can feel the cleverness of the metaphor taking over, the way the writing is all about the writing. For whatever reason, it doesn’t want to see the pain, really. It wants to play with it.  

I’m leaving in a few minutes to record the next pieces for Interlochen Public Radio’s show, “Michigan Writers on the Air.” I’ll be talking about Sharon Olds’ Stag’s Leap, that won the Pulitzer this year. It’s her best book, in my opinion. Olds, who's 70, by the way, writes into the pain of divorce after 32 years of what she thought was a happy marriage. Her metaphors seem to arise naturally. There’s little self-conscious playing with her own grief, and there’s no sense of trying to escape it, either. That’s what I mean.

P.S. Sydney Lea's and my book, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, (Autumn House Press) seems to be selling well. I hope you'll get a copy if you have a Kindle or IPad. Order from Amazon, $9.99. I think you'll like this book if you're old, if you're a writer, if you're young and want to be a writer, or if you're breathing. But that's just my opinion.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 19

April 10^th, snow again, dark and heavy skies. I feel the long stretch of all this. In spite of my miraculous, sensitive oncologists, the angelic nurses and staff—still, it’s my body and I’m tired. And weary, which is different. They said the five weeks of radiation would be easier than chemo, but when all those rays landed squarely on my (delicate) digestive system, I ended up needing to take a cocktail of drugs to keep me from feeling sick all the time. I’m still taking them. Dare I post this picture of how I really feel?

 Now I’m having the “internal” radiation once a week, targeted at internal scar tissue where cancer cells might lurk. No problem, they said: this time we’re hitting below your stomach. Shouldn’t bother you. Maybe it hasn’t. Maybe my extreme fatigue is accumulated from the total radiation. I spent last Saturday and Sunday lying on the sofa sleeping, reading a bit, and sleeping some more. The measure of my fatigue is whether or not I can make myself get on the treadmill for a mere 20 minutes. Some days not.

The word “bravery” has always annoyed me when it comes to major illness. After all, you get sick, you do what you have to do. You take the pills, you get the treatments. Bravery has nothing to do with it. Bravery is when you face something you’re scared of, in hopes of making things better. You fight dragons, you rescue a child from an oncoming truck, you give a speech in front of thousands.

I should have recognized this other kind of bravery: you drag yourself out of bed even when you feel like warmed-over frozen pizza, and you put on makeup and you coordinate your chemo hat with your outfit even when you’re going to be at your desk all day. You get your work done, if slowly. If you have no poems coming, you read and make notes. You read. The main thing is, after months of this, it does seem to take bravery to stay in the world. 

Maybe that’s not specifically bravery, since the will to live is pretty potent, and until our bodies tell us otherwise, we fight tooth and nail to stay in the world. Still, the Sisyphean dailyness of this fatigue seems to extract a kind of bravery.

There’s the launch party at the library on Friday for Growing Old In Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives. I was feeling better when I set this all up, but the party lasts only two hours, and I’m looking forward to it. Since it’s an e-book, we’re calling it “Books in Space.” We’ll have my co-author Sydney Lea on YouTube, the editor of Autumn House Press, Michael Simms, on Skype, the library staff will be there to help people download the book, and we may even be on local TV. The e-book will be available for loan soon, also.  You can order it now on Kindle, $9.99.  You won’t be sorry.

So what about these e-books? How dare we undermine our precious independent bookstores, that I value so dearly? I’m thinking fear is not the way we’ll move into this brave new world. Did DVDs wreck the movie business? A lot of us are buying real books and will continue to.  I’m reading four actual, paper books at present: Syd’s new collection of poetry: I Was Thinking of Beauty; Albert Goldbarth’s older collection of poems, Saving Lives; my former student Erin Coughlin Hollowell’s first collection of poems, Pause, Traveler; Kent Haruf,’s Benediction (all his books are made of solid earth and will save your jaded soul)—and then I’m also reading Barrie Jean Borich’s Body Geographic on my IPad (If you love Chicago, read this book). Jerry and I pass books and the Kindle and the IPad back and forth. I prefer books. I do. But in bed, and traveling, it’s easier to hold the IPad open, and it stores a lot of books.

This was about fatigue, wasn’t it? It was easy to segue to books, since when there’s no energy at present to shape this life, the one lying here on the couch, there’s always another life, another person’s telling, to see into. What’s “real”? The poems are real, the fabricated tales are as real as those we think aren’t fabricated. None “true,” all “true.” We see into and through lives, we stretch our perceptions. Non-fiction, fiction, poems: all ways of seeing. The accumulation is a kind of energy of its own.

My Favorite Quote #5

Favorite Quote #5 is from Sherry Simpson :  “My new motto: Don't half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”Now this is a bit tricky, as I sit here typing while lining up in my head the next four things I need to do, and my email is dinging and I have four tabs open (only four!), and my husband is in the next room putting away clothes and I’m feeling guilty for not helping. I have not closed my study door, which is a sure sign I am going to stay scattered, that I’m willing myself to stay spread out into the world.Then there’s the whole issue of “marketing” if you’re a writer. We have to keep our active presence in the readerly world, God help us, if we want anyone to care when our next book comes out. Did I mention that I’m retired?Here is a thing called “Work Schedule, 1932-1933.” Henry Miller wrote these while he was working on Tropic of Cancer. My friend, the poet Teresa Scollon, passed them on to me.Commandments:1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!5. When you can’t create you can work.6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow Down. Exclude.10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards. What strikes me about this list is the word “joyously.” Whoever did more than one thing at once joyously? Joy is when we are absorbed. We’re not “having a good time,” we’re beyond labeling what we’re having. We’re doing. I wonder if we can do those two things at once—label something joyous and feel joyous?Here’s a poem about that. It’s by Chana Bloch. (from Blood Honey, Autumn House Press, 2009)Wild HoneyA puddle of sun on the wooden floor.The infant crawls to it, licks it,dips a hand in and out,letting the wild honeytrickle through his fingers.Then that voice from on high—Look at the pretty color!—wipes up the glory with a rag of language.