These poems attempt a chronicle of the year and a half when, in early middle age, my wife and I found ourselves both diagnosed and treated for cancer; my wife first, then me. I was diagnosed on her last day of chemotherapy. Some of these poems were written bedside in the hospital, in a hospital bed myself, in the valleys of chemo treatments, or on the high road of reprieves.
Twelve
Sometimes
At noon
Night falls
Who knows
The day
Or hour
Forty-Nine
What I fear
Is language
Will die
With you
If you do
When
I speak
Already
No one
Understands
A word
I mean
Fifty-One
Everything
Given
Goes
Not from
Dust to
Dust but flesh
To flesh
Then flesh
To ash
Now
Or later
Soon
She forgets
She stands
Before us
Receding
Stay reply love
Deny
Fifty-Nine
I know
I cause
My body
To bleed
For you
As if
To suffer
For you
Just as
They say
He bled
For us
One Hundred and Twenty-Three
She called me
In from
The storm
Sat with me
In her
Gold cage
She’d been
Where I would be
Going
She told me
She envied
My youth
She confided
She’d been healed
By Christ
I stumbled
Back into
The storm
Shivering
But not from
The cold
Sometimes/ At noon/ Night falls
