My Wobbly Bicycle, 21

Monday was glorious. Finally the nausea from radiation wore itself out, the sun shone with the bright surprise that I associate only with northern Michigan. It got up to almost 60. Jerry and I raked a bit of the winter debris from our miniscule yard, shoveled the last of the snow out from under the hydrangea and azaleas, chopped up the ice underneath, and when I got tired (quickly),  I sat in a lawn chair for half an hour letting the sun blast away on my face. In the afternoon, we went downtown to see Quartet (I loved it: with Maggie Smith, and Dustin Hoffman’s debut as director/producer). We ate downtown, a normal meal, and I had my first glass of wine in months.

 Life is fluctuation: Tuesday, back to chemo. I don’t have a port in my chest. The doctor and I decided with only six chemos, why bother, and there’s some risk. So, the nurse got the needle in a vein, but apparently it was in the wall of the vein. Nothing could get through. She wiggled it around for a while. Ugh. She tried a second vein. Then she tried one on the right arm. It seemed to go in but the drip was too slow. She called in the “lower arm and hand vein specialist,” who was able to find a good vein farther down my arm. Did you know that the farther toward the extremities you go, the more sensitive the body is? Hands, feet, full of nerve endings. But after it was in, all was well. I slept for most of the four hours of drip—it’s the Benedryl (for avoiding any allergic reactions) that pretty much knocks me out.

I think I snored. There were four others there. I felt bad about it, but they all swore I didn’t.

Monday was Earth Day, and I was thinking, what is all this blog-writing, this general passion for memoir, this artistic spilling of the gut? I sometimes feel foolish, or useless, making my writing a higher priority than joining the groups fighting to save our environment.

No. Not “the environment.” They’re fighting to keep carp out of the Great Lakes, they’re fighting to save a 300-year-old tree from the road crews. “Heaven is precision,” says Christian Wiman. “What I crave is writing that gets right down to the nub of Now.”

               As the late, great James Wright said, “I want the “pure, clear word.”

               This is the thing. The immediate, personal word. The lyric impulse.  

               The needle in a vein.

Wiman reminds us (in his new book, My Bright Abyss: the Meditations of a Believer), that It was the pure lyric spirit of the poet Osip Mandelstam that Stalin couldn’t abide, that put Mandelstam (pictured here) finally in a concentration camp where he died. It was, says Wiman, “the existential liberty and largess, the free-singing soul that, Stalin seemed to sense, would always slip free of the state’s net. People who think poetry has no power have a very limited conception of what power means. Even now, in this corporate country, where presidents do not call up poets on the telephone, some little lyric is eating into the heart of money.”

Elizabeth Bowen: “To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything. “

George Oppen: “I think there is no light in the world / but the world. And I think there is light.”

I can’t justify the books of poems—or essays—I’ve written, I can’t justify my mornings at the computer, tapping out words that aren’t trying to persuade, aren’t trying to fix or mend, aren’t trying to explain. They’re trying to sing, I guess. They seem to want to be written, whether I win big prizes with them or not.

And writing about this cancer: I use the word “about,” but that’s a misnomer, really. The cancer’s a force behind the words. It’s one of the tensions that will play in the poem even if it doesn’t make an actual appearance. It does often make an appearance. It’s on my mind.  How to keep it in its place, so the poem opens out into the unknown instead of locking itself down in fascination with details or wanting to narcissistically TELL ALL. In other words, how to make a true poem. Or a true essay. Or a true story. I have no answers. I turn to others’ poems and essays—like Christian Wiman’s memoir above, about his cancer and his faith—where I can watch how it’s done well (I think he does it well), or not so well. And turn to the masters, them first and last, the words that have lasted a lot longer than blog posts.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 18

Yesterday morning we were in a snow-globe of lake-effect fluff, drifting all over. It was beautiful. To me these days, most things are, well, a revelation, meaning that being alive is—shall I say just great? That sounds so Panglossian. I mean it’s all okay, snow or sun, no joke.  It’s April 3. Melting snow is soaking some moisture down where it needs to be, after our dry, dry summer last year. The tart cherries should be good this year. And our two good friends, Myrna and Joan, from Traverse City got married in D.C. yesterday after 20 years living as a committed gay couple with no legal protections or civil recognition. A great day for them—ages 72 and 80. My daughter Kelly lives in D.C. and attended (she's in the photo), to represent us.  And I finished my 25 sessions of daily radiation yesterday. I imagine I feel better already, not having those rays daily directed straight at my digestive system. I’ve felt pretty punk most of the time, and increasingly tired. I’m taking long afternoon naps and going to bed early. Next is three weeks (3 sessions)  of “internal” radiation, to target the scar tissue around the hysterectomy surgery. Then three rounds,  three weeks apart, of chemo again.Will I be “cured?” The radiation oncologist carefully says we “hope to keep the cancer away.” This is accurate. It was always accurate even when we didn’t know it, that what we do moment-by-moment is collapse and resurrect, collapse and resurrect. We hope the balance hangs in our favor a good long while. The mind is good at ignoring, mostly, our end. But at some cost, it seems to me now. There is a “dearest freshness deep down things,” as the poet Hopkins puts it, that’s only touched when our feet are (metaphorically, at least) unshod, when they can feel the soil we come from and return to.My step-daughter Amy visited this last week. She teaches at Lane College in Eugene, Oregon, and gave up most of her spring break to be here for me and for her dad. I was too tired to do much more than take a jaunt to the local museum and go out to eat once, but it was great to have her here. She built me a little Buddha stand.Sometime I’ll write exclusively about my deep affection for both Christianity and Buddhism, how each has mattered to me. I’m steeped in both cultures. I’ve loved the images, the rituals, the glorious language of the Christian church. After my years on the cushion, those images, etc., haven’t gone away. Who would want them to? They become, shall I say, “seen through” in their provisionality. In the same way, I suspect, that St. Teresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen, St. John of the Cross, and the Buddha, saw through to simply what is, was, and always will be. It’s just the plain shining, gritty truth of things, with or without my or anyone else’s smart-ass input.I just read a fine interview of Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry Magazine by my old friend Jeanne Murray Walker in Image Magazine. Wiman says, “Silence is the necessary soil for poetry, and the blight that eats into our surest words. Silence is the only sound God ever makes, and it is the often crushing condition of his absence. Every once in a while you encounter a work of art that silence has truly and permanently entered, like fallen autumn leaves that, riddled with holes, are on their way to being entirely light.”Corollary Issue: Why I Have this Cancer: Thank heaven for the researchers and curers. That’s not what I mean. I mean metaphysically why. I think of Job, who refused to ask. And I think of this, from John Donne’s Sermon CXXX:It is an execrable and damnable monosyllable,why; it exasperates God, ruins us.