Alaskan in Asja Land

My last evening on Cape Cod.  I'm sitting in the window of the coffee shop, watching the wind trouble the bare branches of oak trees and flap the awning and drive the low-flying cumulus.  The sun is low, blaring through blue clouds.  The rest of the sky is that pale blue, yes, of a robin's egg.  It's cold, maybe in the low 40's, but walking across the parking lot, I heard my first robin songs.  Winter's not letting go of the East, but I am, for another six months.

This afternoon, as I have every day I've been on the Cape, I visited my mother, who lives in a nursing home in Chatham.  She's 85, and she can't walk.  A brain aneurysm fourteen years ago ruined her leg, shattered her life, changed so much about her, but not some deeply essential poignant Asja-ness.  I almost said sweetness, but my mother is not always sweet.  Most of the time, she is.  But she is also sometimes agitated, sometimes confused, sometimes angry, sometimes impatient, sometimes sad.  My mother can't or won't do many things she used to do.  She no longer reads, or knits, or writes letters, or answers the phone.  And though she can't access all the emotions she once knew, she can't fake or hide the ones she has.  She is 100% authentic, 100% real.  When you are in the presence of such rawness, it's hard not to be real, too.

This afternoon, I breezed into her room, switched off the TV, filled the teapot, heated water, and plopped down in her wheelchair.  She watched me intently from her recliner.  After notating a birthday card from her to my nephew, and one to my stepson, I read to her from my book, telling her the story of a woman who disliked me intensely when I was young.  She listened.  She took it all in.  Sometimes, when she's experiencing a complicated emotional reaction, she struggles for words.  How could this be, she asked.  That is one way this woman is still 100% my mother.  A mother is someone who can't fathom how her child could be disliked.  Often I read to my mother, as she has always loved stories.  Sometimes we call friends and relatives.  Always I update her on goings-on at my sister's house, or in my family's life.  Often we look at photographs.  But it's been a long time since I've talked to my mother like that, telling her the whole story of this woman who disliked me, puzzling it out with her, processing it.  She listened, was 100% there.  And then.

She looked up suddenly at the clock on the wall, and visibly startled:  "It's 5 o'clock!" she exclaimed.

I startled too.  I'd been looking at her bedside clock, which hadn't been advanced at daylight savings.  I'd lost track of time, and all at once, it was time for me to head to the next town to pick up my niece from her cello lesson.  Now my mother was agitated.  "Are you okay Mom?"  I asked.

"Yes," she said, though she clutched one hand with the other, kept turning to look at the clock, fidgeting.

"What time do you eat dinner?"

"Five o'clock," she said.

"Don't worry, the aide won't forget you.  Has the aide ever forgotten you?"

"No."

"Do you want me to keep reading?"

"Yes." But as I started up, she kept fidgeting.  "No," she said.

I put the book down.  "Are you hungry Mom?"

"Yes," she said, her voice higher than normal.  Something rushed up through my body, wrapped hard around my heart.  I looked at my mother.  She was anxious for supper, for this steady ritual in her day.  She wanted to be on time.  She didn't want to be left behind.  I hesitated just a second before I responded to emotional flash-flood.  I grabbed her hand. 

"Mom.  I love you so much."  In that moment, I loved her with my entire body, a visceral, animal love.

She grabbed my hand, locked her eyes with mine.

"I love you too."

And then the aide arrived to take her to supper.  "See you tomorrow, Mom," I said.

What does this have to do with Cancerland?  Nothing.  A brief conversation with my sister the other day, about "survival rates," about so-called "cure rates," about late recurrences of breast cancer, threw me back into that realm again.  It's like a seizure in my life now.  Rare, but serious.  Cancerland:  that place where I sit in the same room with the word "cancer," befuddled, uncomprehending.  That place where cancer casts its shadow on me.  When I fall into that place, I start browsing the web for cancer news.  I reread the same statistics. Why?  Sometimes I reread the pathology report from my surgery, nearly three years old.  I wake up scared.  I worry about the ache in my side.  Am I living a cancer-inducing life?  Stressing out too much?

The thing about being with my mother now, and the thing about being with her as I went through cancer treatment, is that she does not live in Cancerland or Aneurysmland.  She lives in Asja-land, and it is immediate.  It is supper time.  Or it is time to drink tea and read a book.  Or watch birds at the window feeder.  In the presence of my mother, I have only one job, and that is to be fully present with her, to be fully alive in that small room.  To not hesitate even a moment before responding to the over-riding impulse of my heart.  To grab her hand.  To grab that living hand and hold it tight while I can.

             

Tree-Shaped Soul Standing in the Rain

Sitting at my brother’s kitchen island typing on my computer.  He is sitting on the other end, typing on his, preparing for a hearing (he’s a lawyer).  We are eating toast, drinking coffee.  Outside, a steady but gentle rain drizzles down, almost invisible.  It looks more like static than rain, like floaters streaming across the eye surfaces.  The branchlets of the dogwood tree in his front yard, tinged maroon, hold hundreds of drops and droplets of water, which glint in the flat light.  Each represents the accumulation of dozens of raining-down almost formless particles.  Every once in a while a fattened drop falls off to earth.  Last night, my brother and I stayed up until 1 am, what seems an every five year or so ritual of recounting our childhood stories and weird memories, trying to make sense of the inexplicable nature of our father. We grew up with a troubled man, an immigrant of mercurial moods and haunting, half-baked stories of war, a man of secrets.  He was a mystery to us, more so now that he’s dead.  Do we think that if we add up enough confusing fragments, they would resolve into clarity?   Accrue into something whole, a drop, a liquid bead, with form and weight?  Perhaps we believe on some level that the bead will then drop from our arms and shoulders, leaving us cleansed.

It’s good to stand in the rain sometimes.  Better to stand there together.  At the end of the night all we could offer each other was affirmation our mutual unresolved  confusion.  I hear yours.  Thanks for hearing mine. 

One hour later, at the station, waiting for my train back to Providence, RI, I’m watching inexplicable stories in the Amrack station.  A girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen, in heels so spiky and tall, she can’t walk a straight line, shoes held to her bare feet by a clear plastic band the color of head cheese jelly.  Dirty blonde hair stringy against her skinny shoulders.  Exhausted pale skin, some acne.  Two men converge on her, one scolding and urging her toward the double doors leading to the parking area, another old and grizzled-looking walking beside her for awhile, telling some kind of joke.  Someone’s daughter, I think.   Someday, like me, will she stay up late, talk with a sibling, try to piece the inexplicable broken bits into some semblance of a whole?  How do you tell such a story, with no narrative line?  With no transitions or connective tissue?  With too many tangled reasons? With missing pieces, big vacuous blanks, gaps, whole corners torn off.  Is it right to make up a narrative line?  My mother says tell it “in circles,” and that’s how she talks about her own broken, long-hidden memories of trauma.  If the fragments circle around you, there you are, standing in the center.  The solid trunk of yourself.  Whoever you are, you have constructed this self/soul, grown it up out of chaos, muddle, shattering.

Healing is like that.  There is no linear progression, no twelve consecutive steps.  Even people I know who’ve joined literal twelve step programs don’t finish the twelfth and stop and consider themselves done.  They circle back.  Each circle perhaps closes in upon the self/soul, the thing that you are attempting to make, to create, to rebuild, out of what’s inborn and out of whatever’s happened to you. The title of a book of poems by Olena Davis is “And Her Soul Out of Nothing.”  I have thought about that title for years.  I love the idea implicit in it.  I like to wake up every morning and think about it, the promise and responsibility held within those six words.

When I look at my brother, I do not see my father’s baffling, shape-shifting story thick around him, obscuring his features or his actions.  When I look at my brother I see someone solid, vertical, a certain kind of tree.  His children could tell you a pretty straight-forward narrative of growing up with that man as their dad.   He burdened them with no secrets or sleights of hand.  When my brother looks at me, I hope he doesn’t see breast cancer or childhood wounds.  I hope he doesn’t see memories impossible to decipher or resolve.  I hope he sees a tree-shaped soul, standing in the rain.

In the Meadow of a Darker Darkness

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Another early morning at the hotel coffee shop in Boston.  Outside, the blizzard still rages.  It was quieter here yesterday, but this is the second day of the conference, and the governor has been turned up very high.  The writers are amped.  All around me people are talking about writing.  Books contracted, reviews published, favorite talks, books read, writing projects, poetry.  At one table, three people tap madly on their laptops.  Others peruse the catalogue, trying to decide which panels and talks to attend today (deciding among twenty concurrent sessions).  Beside me, a man and woman passionately discuss the poet Elizabeth Bishop.  I think this conversation is actually the rarest magic.  Not “networking,” or sitting passively and exhausted listening to panel discussions, then moving like en masse up or down an escalator to the next session.  In conversations, random encounters, connections rooted in love of writing. 

But then there are the ideas lifted from the overwhelm of language coming at me, all day long.  There’s another way to look at all this.  It’s like I’m wandering around in a daze through a summer meadow with my butterfly net, trying to snatch some exotic, startling new species from the thrum of millions.  Yesterday I netted a phrase from a reading by Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, something about wanting darkness to get even darker.  And my insides leaned toward those words as they flitted by, saying yes.  And in a morning talk about eco-poetics, a neurobiologist’s theory was bandied, that religion is an evolutionary response to the fear of death.  Without it, the speaker said, we would live in a constant state of horror.  And my insides leaned in, then back, and said, “Wait, is that true?”  It is easy to collect and collect such specimens of language and idea, and like a naturalist, jot notes, lose those pages as the onrush of new data floods in.  It’s such a big, astonishing and confusing meadow.  But how do you let such strange butterflies escape without studying them?

Because people do it every day, religious or not, face up to their own “annihilation.”  People diagnosed with a serious illness face it.  People in their late years face it.  People who lose a loved one face it.  Who does that leave?  Poets do it every time they sit down to write, and maybe it’s even why they sit down.  Last night, two master poets, Seamus Heaney and Dereck Walcott, both quite ancient, discussed their friend the late Russian émigré poet Joseph Brodsky.  Walcott said that Brodsky lived (and wrote) in constant fear of his failing heart.  When he was dying, he wrote about a “wild darkness” toward which he was heading.  Walcott also described his belief that poetry is rooted in silence.  It doesn’t just arises out of silence.  It creates silence.  A poem’s initiation (maybe a moment of inspiration) makes a space of silence from which a poem emerges. 

At the eco-poetics panel, which examined how poetry and science relate to each other, the word “wonder” kept flying around.  The panelists claimed that the expression of wonder was what separated science from poetry.  My friend the writer Doug Chadwick would disagree.  He calls science “an organized form of wonder.”  But arguing that claim isn’t the point here.  Something else didn’t ring true about it.  I couldn’t stop thinking that poetry isn’t just an expression of wonder.  We aren’t just open-mouthed and wide-eyed dreamily swishing our nets around at the swarm of insect life above our heads.  We are running for our lives, or we are lying face down, gripping fistfuls of grass, holding on to the earth, weeping bitter tears into the dirt.  Poetry is about horror as well as wonder.  The wild darkness we confront when we write. 

Am I implying that poetry is my religion?  It’s true, writing is what gives me the courage to face the wonder and horror of life and death on earth, and the inevitability of my own annihilation.  Meanwhile, I want to stay part of this buzz and hum.  I want to drink coffee and walk out in the blizzard, the wind gusting so hard, I’m afraid to cross the street for fear it will knock me down.  I want to flit and flirt and comingle.  But without stopping, without writing, without daily confrontation with the wild dark forever at my (your) heels, I risk another kind of annihilation.

Here are the lines of Valzhyna Mort’s poem “Mockingbird Hotel”:

But often, to shed light on the darkness, light

isn’t enough.  Often what I need is even a darker

darkness.

In her poem, hallelujahs break out on the gritty streets.  They wash over the ground, stir up birds.  Now night has fallen on the meadow.  I wander, the tall grass shushing my thighs, my net flailing in the air above me, gathering darkness, along with a few stars, giving them back.

(In memory of Ginny Hill Wood, from wild aliveness, passed into wild darkness.  She won't feel a stranger.) 

Never Not Broken

Cape Cod.  March.  Coming in like a lioness, wind gusting all night, rattling the roof of my sister's house.  Waking me at 2 am, in my attic bed.  The trees bare and making scratchy noises against the ash-colored sky.  The grass a heathery blend of stubborn (or foolish) green and tan.  Mud.  Bluster.  Hats, gloves, a neck warmer knit of musk ox wool by my graduate student.  Cape Cod.  Memory palace.  Walk down a familiar sandy trail to the bay with my sister's goofball golden retriever, the official breed of the Cape.  Each new resident to the Cape is handed a blonde pup by the Chamber of Commerce (it sure seems that way).  Some greedy people take two or three.  Sand in my shoes.  Each branch brushing my leg reminding me to do a tick-check later.  Cape Cod.  A coffee shop called Jo Mama's.  A niece and two nephews, now grown into that sweet spot:  14, 12, 10.  Real conversations about their very real and separate worlds.  Settlers of Catan game going on for days.  The attic bedroom that talks to me, whispers in my ear.  In the thick of chemo-induced anemia I'd crawled the last flight of stairs on all fours. Insomnia.  Lakes, swamps, doctors.  The UU church, now renovated.  Whenever I go to a service, tears.  At the same old songs, at what they meant to me three years ago, as I sought weekly refuge there.  Memories like ghosts that brush my shoulders and calves and hair.  I don't even have to greet them anymore, say hello, they just flit through, and are gone.

It's been three years.  I thought the oncologist would tell me that it was another "graduation day."  That three years would signify some right of passage.  Deemed safe enough to return for only once a year appointments, instead of twice.  Instead he said:  "You look very healthy, perfect in fact."  And then he said, "I'll be seeing you every six months for at least five years."  Don't get me wrong.  I like chatting with Dr. S., who answers every question with thoughtfulness and challenges what he sees as my more extreme or non-scientific choices with a raised eyebrow and a scholarly yet wry, "Why?"  Making sure I'm not following some crack-pot advice. 

"Why no dairy?"

"Isn't there something about caseinate?"

"It's out there.  But no study has backed it up yet."

"The Mediterranean diet doesn't include much dairy."  (I know from his wife's blog that they like this one).

"Goat cheese."

"Yeah, I used to like goat cheese."

"There's only one food item that's been definitively linked with breast cancer."

I'm thinking this might be something new, and for a second I worry that the science is going to switcheroo again around soy.  "What is it?"

"Alcohol."

Sometimes suffering is a subtle ache under the breast bone, a ghost of suffering.  Last time I saw Dr. S., I left the office with the ache transformed into a brightness, joy, the cousin of suffering.  This time, it was tempered.  Never not broken.  And yet moving forward from that place.  And writing from that place.  Cape Cod.  Boston.  Dr. S.  A man in his sixties who devotes his life to caring for those with cancer, to studying it, with the hope that someday the suffering he bears witness to -- including that of his wife, a two-time breast cancer survivor -- will lessen.  Brave enough to sit in and with the suffering, day after day.      

In church, the minister used the word "akinanda," said it meant "never not broken."  The nature of life.  Cape Cod.  Cancer.  The body.  Wild weather, wild coasts, cancer clusters.  Yearly arrival of right whales, fin whales, humpbacks.  Winter strandings of common dolphins.  Reluctant spring, persistent winter.  Not the summer dream of summer people, but a wintery landscape.  Leafless.  Earth-toned.  The grit and rough fibers showing through.  Body never not broken, yet perfect. 

The minister last Sunday said we create out of brokenness.  I had my journal and starting jotting notes, tears splatting on the page and blurring my scribbles.  Does all art arise out of brokenness? I wrote.  I know my friend Jo, an artist and spiritual healer, would vehemently disagree, but in my life, it's been true. 

You can't talk about brokenness and art and not bring up Leonard Cohen.  And the minister did.  She quoted his famous "Anthem":

You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.   

An ex-girlfriend of Cohen's, asked in an interview where his lyrics come from, song after song, said that they came because he was brave enough to sit in the suffering and write from it. 

Finishing this post, I am in Boston, the morning before a big writing conference, sitting in a Starbucks at 6:30 am.  Outside, a fierce wind blows snow sideways.  March lions in, roaring, stalking down the narrow streets.  There are 11,000 writers and teachers here, in this complex of hotels and halls, with private reasons and intentions and hidden and exposed brokenness.  I think of my visit with Dr. S.  "You look perfect, in fact."  And yet, "every six months for at least five years," my never not broken body will be checked for signs of cancer coming back.  The meaning of writing, the aspiration, the work and craft: to be brave enough it sit with that.  To sit and write like a refugee.

Head-Tripping Down That Crazy River

It’s my last full day in Hawaii, and I’m sitting outside the kava bar in the sun with a cup of tea.  I’ve been texting with my niece about change.  I’m resisting it right now, digging in my heels.  I’ve been alternately anxious, sad, and calm about this next chapter in my life, leaving Craig for a month, flying east thousands of miles to Boston to see my family, to attend a writing conference, to give some readings, and of course to see all of my doctors for the six-month ritual.  It will be three years since my diagnosis come April. 

My mind is somersaulting ahead of me, but my body is very much here on this metal chair, at this red table, wind gusts buffeting me, a green gecko staring me in the eyes.   The antidote to anxiety has been, as always, focusing on what’s right in front of me, what’s finding it’s way into my ears.  The wind’s making a hollow fluty sound.  Some trippy music is playing.  A man’s talking about getting ice cream.  Life doesn’t actually careen, but proceeds by moments like these.  One after another. 

This morning, after meditation, I pulled a Zen card from the stack “Mind” was the card I drew.  An ugly image of a head filled with mechanical parts.  Sometimes oracles can be shockingly plain-spoken, and I’m reminded to be careful what I ask for.  “There’s a head trip going on around you,” the text said.  “Take a look at yourself; it might be yours.”  And it was.  My head was tripping over a passel of writing grants I had on my list to apply for, all of them due on March 1, the day I arrive in Boston.   And this impossible to-do list was completely interfering with my ability to be present.  But a part of me was thinking (and writing on a to-do list) that I would apply to them all, and still take one last run through the gulch, one last walk, have one last dinner with my friends.  With one day left here on the island.  And so at 2 pm I had to make a choice.  Be present here, now, or go into a major stress-mode.  Not enough mode.  Comparison mode.  Scarcity mode.  Whatever mode.  Craig said, “Well, by waiting until the last minute, you basically made a choice about what is most important to you.”  Ouch.  True, I suppose.  Craig is also a non-word-mincing oracle in my life.  But that’s another matter. 

There’s something pre-cancerous about that head-trip:  not wanting to choose.  Wanting it all.  The never-enough machine.  It’s what makes me hesitate to buy airline tickets, driving Craig mad.  If I make a choice, it means I rule out another option.  And how will the people in my life react to my choice?  What I mean by “pre-cancerous” is partly how I lived my life before cancer, and partly a comparison to the beast itself.  Cancer is a disease with a serious “never enough” complex.  It can’t stop.  It won’t stop.  It’s rapacious.  Like a badly managed fishery, it runs rampant until the very thing – a body – that sustains it is wiped out.

And I know that I can’t live that way anymore.  I had to take a deep breath and let go of those grant proposals.  I had to take a deep breath and say yes to this red table, and the writing of this blog post.  To saying conscious goodbyes to this place that has nurtured me for two and a half months.  “Things keep changing,” I texted my niece.  At times like these I feel like I’m floating above my own life, and it’s all slipping away.  Months have passed – how?  Three years have passed since the day someone said the word “malignant” and the word “cancer” and meant me, my body.  So much water has slipped under that bridge that divides my life into before and after.  And it IS slipping away, all of it, but I am not floating above anything, or standing upon a bridge watching. I am in it.  I am immersed, the flesh on earth muck and thrash of it.  I am on the moving walkway.  And no matter how hard I dig my heels in, the moving walkway does not stop.

So now it is 11 pm.  And my little office room is cleared out, a white sheet over the futon couch.  My bags are packed.  I drank tea at the kava bar and ordered seeds for our Alaskan garden.  I took that last run up the hill and down the gulch with the dog.  I made one last meal with my friends.  Laura and I carried our baskets outside to pick veggies from the garden, and all the hens, ducks and geese ran toward us and milled around our ankles.  We put our baskets down and tossed them handfuls of cracked corn.  Tippy the goose ate from my hands.  Wally the rooster ate cracked corn off a duck’s back.  We filled their water can, then picked spinach and basil and tat soi and chard and kale and cooked together.  We said goodnight.  The grant proposals I could have written – they are far out of sight by now; they’ve slipped away.  The trade winds are fierce.  I will sleep, immersed in their persistence, slipping down the river, along with everything else.

P.S.  That's the moon setting in the photo ... 

Dark, Wild Nights and News of What is Found There

In the NY Times last week, writer Susan Gubar, who is living with advanced ovarian cancer, tells us about her “dark nights.”

 http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/living-with-cancer-waking-in-the-dark/

How is this news?  It indeed is, but news of another kind than we’re normally used to finding beneath a headline.  It’s news from a bedroom.  It’s news from the interior of a disquieted mind woken in the middle of the night.  It’s news of the intensely personal psychological experience of imminent mortality.   It’s a dispatch from a place no one wants much to contemplate much less enter.   But I believe it’s news our souls need to be fully awake.  Poetry provides that kind of news also, as William Carlos Williams (who was a doctor as well as a poet) so beautiful stated in a famous poem:  It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.

I can’t help but think that Williams was thinking about his patients as well as his readers when he wrote those lines.  People do die miserably every day, or face the prospect of death, alone, with no one to witness their journey.  People fear this as they age or fall ill.  I’m thinking of how people seek out poems during the darkest times, as Joan Didion did after the sudden death of her husband (see her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking).  I’m thinking of my writer-friend Tom, whose wife died of ovarian cancer years ago.  I loaned him my copies of poet Donald Hall’s books about the loss of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon.  Tom kept those books for years.  I don't know if or when he read them.  Perhaps they were too painful, and at the same time, I hope, their existence reminded him that his own dark nights were not solitary.  Similarly, Susan Gubar’s dark nights ask us to witness her journey, to at the same time to know that we’re not alone in ours.  Others have gone before us, with grace, fully present.

It is a bright day where I sit contemplating dark nights, the sun splashing against the pale yellow shingled wall of a building, against the branches of fern trees, hibiscus and ti-plants and window-awnings painted dark green.  I sit in shadow, on a plastic chair at a plastic table.  The Nambu courtyard is my favorite place to work in Hawaii.  Behind the tiny café, a door opens to a garden with narrow covered wooden walkways, like funky boardwalks in some remote Alaskan village.  It’s a cool morning, and I wear a sweater.  A gray-green lizard emerges from a gap between the window trim and the wall of the building.  Myna-birds chark-chark in the palms, and the lizard jumps onto my table, watches me type. It’s a green-brown gecko with iridescent green eyes, the inside of its mouth pale peach.  Now, astride a leaf, it turns a little more greenish.  I watch its finely scaled skin expand below its underarms as it breathes.  It hops to the railing, disappears around the corner.  A crab spider bobs at the center of its web.  At the web’s edges, there is one blonde hair and a few bundles of insect cached for later.  The spider looks like a crumb of dried-up black bread.  It sits motionless and content in the center of perfectly woven death-trap.  It is morning in the land of the living.  Sunlight roots out the murk of shadows.  Things appear clear.

Susan Gubar’s dark night is familiar to me.  She describes waking at 1 am, staring at the band of light across her ceiling (from a night light), troubled by the thoughts that wait there, the fears, regrets, the darkness we mostly outrun, chasing daylight.  I can hear my older brother’s voice as I write this, chastising me for being too morbid, for dwelling too much in those places.  I’ve learned a lot from that brother, how to spin a disappointing experience around to find its hidden bright face.  Once, when I was in the midst of chemo, he and his wife drove Craig and me to the Bronx to visit my childhood neighborhood, along Fordham Road, in an old Italian neighborhood.  But being Sunday, and the neighborhood still being Italian and Catholic, as it was when we lived there, the market where my mother shopped was closed, as well as my brother’s favorite Italian restaurant.  We settled for a dimly-it, nearly empty joint with so-so fare.  But my brother acted as though it were a five-star.  I don’t remember what we ate, but I do remember his graciousness toward the waiters, his hearty consumption of everything on his plate, his proclaiming it all excellent.  I used that trick with my step-kids when they were small and hungry and cranky.  When he does that, plowing past hints of disgruntlement, I feel grateful and touched and also a little sad.   

I remember another afternoon at the hospital.  My brother had driven four hours from Connecticut in the middle of his work-week to take me to a chemo infusion.  A lawyer, he had a case coming to trial, so he was planning to drive me back to the Cape and then turn around and head back to New York City that night.  As I drifted to sleep during the infusion, he sat beside me typing madly on his computer.  When the volunteers came around offering sandwiches and soup, he accepted with great enthusiasm, taking time with his choice.  And when the oncologist came in to tell me that my red blood cell count was too low, that I’d need a blood transfusion, and that we’d be there for several more hours, I remember looking over to Andy with a sinking feeling.  He glanced up from his computer, grinned, and gave me two thumbs up, as though it were the best news we could have.  He stayed on the Cape that night, got up at 5 am to drive back to the city. 

My brother is not a Pollyanna (I don't think a lawyer can be).  I see his attitude as a conscious act of will, a resistance to pettiness and ingratitude.  He grew up with the same dark-dwelling father as I did.  He knows the consequences of viewing life as perpetual suffering, which was my father’s mantra.  I recognize that lingering too much in the valley of the shadow is unhealthy for me, too.  But shunning the valley isn’t an option either; at that edge between dark and light is the habitat of poetry.  And a cancer diagnosis lands you squarely in that ecotone, that mixed-up thicket, life on one side, death on the other. I don’t find reading Gubar’s writing about her fears, her experience of the dark night disturbing, even though the thought of my cancer coming back in a terminal stage is my greatest fear.  In fact, I find her words strangely reassuring.  I am grateful to her for writing out of that place that I dread going.  I am grateful to hear that lonely voice, to know that it is the voice of a woman fully alive, fully present, even with her fears, no matter how short her remaining time on earth.  She still writes.  And her voice is one of many crowding my own dark nights.  There is an intense isolation to cancer and I imagine to any serious illness.  I felt it when I was undergoing treatment, and when I was recovering from treatment, and now, when my fears rear up, and I stay silent, because expressing fear might dismay my loved ones or make people uncomfortable.    

I saw that isolation in the tears leaking out of the harrowed eyes of Cloud, a man I know who is recovering from an excruciating ordeal of treatment for lymphoma that had morphed into leukemia.  He sat with us at the kava bar the other night, and told us about what he’d been through.  He held himself stiffly, as if he were looking out from some kind of straight jacket we couldn’t see.  His voice didn’t break or falter; at one point the tears just trailed their slow way down the landscape of his face, like trickles of water across an arid plateau.  There must be so many tears in there, pushing against his skin, a whole aquifer.  I saw him the next day buying produce at the farmer’s market, out in the daylight, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, just like anyone.  Perhaps all we need is for someone to bear witness, in the time it takes to converse over kava or tea.  To really mean it when we ask “How are you doing?”  To really mean we are willing to hear the truth.  Perhaps that’s enough for the isolating shadows to pull back from our feet.

After cancer, the body is one big shadow-trigger.  Every ache, every twinge.  I tweaked a nerve in my lower back last Wednesday.  My hip went into spasm right before a yoga class.  I spent that hour and a half with tears not leaking but pouring down my face.  I couldn’t bend forward to grasp my ankles.  I couldn’t do boat pose or canoe.  Even lying flat on my back in corpse hurt.  I felt damned sorry for myself.  A couple days later, I asked Craig to massage my sacrum.  I bent forward grasping the edge of a table, stretching my back out.  As he worked his thumbs into the muscles along my spine, I started sobbing.  A well of terror and grief -- the unsaid -- gushed from that place my body, the place that holds up my spine, my base, my bedrock. 

Sometimes out of the blue I turn to Craig and blurt, “I still can’t believe I had cancer.”  Even the word cancer feels dissociated from me, blank and white-washed and impotent. 

Once, my mother broke a glass in the kitchen sink, while washing dishes, and a splinter imbedded deep in her knuckle.  She didn’t know it was in there.  The cut healed, but the knuckle continued to throb.  In my memory, I see her holding the thumb as the splinter breaks out and emerges.  A tiny glittering piece of shrapnel, a hidden pain made suddenly visible.

I see why my childhood Catholicism is effective.  If you believe that this earth is a temporary dwelling place, that our real home is elsewhere, then it’s easier to let it go.  It’s easier to either dwell on life as suffering, as my father did, or to live only for the moment, only for the light:  “life is short,” “carpe diem” and all that jazz.  If this is our true home, what does it mean, this short time we have here?  Reproduction?  Leaving a legacy?  Making a name?  Me, I don’t know what’s on the other side. I trust it’s the right place to be, whether another world, or absorption into this one, body into earth into water into breath into molecule.  And here, right now, is the right place to be, at this green plastic table. Over the years, I’ve heard my optimist brother quote “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” the villanelle by Dylan Thomas:  “Rage against the dying of the light.”  It's not about going gentle, for me, but fiercely awake.  “The darkness around us is deep,” wrote another poet, William Stafford.  To be willing to look that into the darkness without flinching, and to tell of it, as Susan Gubar does, is an act of courage, and a gift.  “I have been here,” I imagine she tells us, in that place you fear.  "It is not what you think.  It a road, and it is the same road we all travel."

The most beautiful thing is this morning is the play between sunlight and shadows on these leaves.   A worse thing than mortality, than a dark night, than insomnia, is to be here, in this place, right now, alive, yet not fully awake.

Trouble and Wind, Please Be Kind

God’s gonna trouble the waters.

After two weeks of benign winds, the heavy trades are back, and last night, after they troubled my sleep and needled me awake, I slept on the futon couch in my writing room, which is on the leeward side of the house.  The angle of the futon couch (I didn’t bother to flatten it into a bed) is a wide “V” and gravity pulls me into the crease, so it’s a little like a hammock, but rigid.  Lying here, I can see the sky now, at 6:00 am, the ironwoods tossing against a strange purplish gray dawn.  The air is filled with mist.  I know because I wandered outside a few minutes ago to make sure someone had remembered to close the chicken’s coop door last night.  The wind did.  The chickens were locked out.  The old rooster Wally’s been crowing for an hour, distressed, and the geese have been shrieking all night, lined up below the grass clump where one of the females has taken to nesting, clamoring as if their noise could bring her out.  But once a bird gets broody, nothing, not hunger or thirst, will dislodge her.

If the trade winds are gods (and there are many arguments I can put forth that they are), then when they wake me, perhaps it is because I am made of mostly water.  I lie there, listening, anxiety building, like pressure in my kombucha bottles.  Bubbles from deep below the god-troubled surface.  A therapist would say I take on the troubles of others.  My high school chemistry teacher wrote in my senior yearbook:  Some people were born to bear the trouble of others on their shoulders; may your shoulders be strong.  When the wind blows strong, I am water reflecting one of those plants bending low on its slender stalk, leaves ripped off my branchlets.  I am the beet seedling whipped one way, then the other, as the wind clocks around, until the stem just snaps.  And I am the lamb.      

The lamb our young friend Jess brought down finally rests quietly in the pasture, a little apart from the others.  Jess nursed the orphan at her house for months.  It slept in Jess’s bed sometimes, but mostly in a dog kennel in a little fenced paddock in her backyard.  It was a rough day for the lamb yesterday, suddenly confronted with a flock of sheep, a field of tall grass, and no bottle.  She kept looking for her fellow humans.  The lamb had never looked into a mirror.  It must have felt brutal, sudden.  Trouble befallen her.  She kept escaping through the de-activated electric fence all afternoon, running toward whoever was crossing the lawn.  I’d go to her, hug her, rub her down, and guide her back under the wire.  She seemed briefly appeased, and would run back to the flock, only to escape again. Farmer Ralph scolded me.  “She’ll never learn she’s a sheep if you keep coddling her.”  He even tried to drive her off the lawn with the riding mower, which might have been comical were I a different person, if I didn’t identify with that lamb’s need (I know, I’m supposed to be a biologist).  I screamed at him until he stopped. 

The trade wind screams over the land, bangs against the house walls, whistles through the windows, blows placemats off the table on the lanai, knocks down the candlestick and salt shaker.  There’s a song Craig likes, about autumn’s “bully winds,” how they “did rub their faces in the snow.”  That sounds gentle, like shaggy horses burying their muzzles in a drift, but this wind is not gentle; gusting at nearly 40, it’s trouble.

Remember that song “Trouble” by Cat Stevens?  I woke up on the futon couch thinking about it.  I like the irrational things the song asks of trouble:  “Trouble please be kind.” And “Trouble, won’t you be fair.”  The song was written, apparently, when Stevens was struggling to survive from tuberculosis.  He thought he would die, so he addressed his disease directly.  Did it listen and back off?

I know the futility and yet the drive to talk to the wind, to a disease, to trouble.  Last night, in our weekly poem exchange, my friend Erin wrote of learning about the suicide of a former student.  “Take a moment to send me some peace,” she asked.  And Jess dropped off that orphan lamb because she was flying out today to see her grandmother, who’s very ill.  “Take care of my lamb,” she asked.  Her grandma had breast cancer years ago, and it came back.  Of course that kind of news always troubles my waters.

And today, I am thinking about even larger troubles, the troubled earth itself.  I am preparing to talk to someone at Canadian broadcasting about my book, which in part recounts the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which troubled the waters in a big and lasting way almost 25 years ago.  It killed nearly half of the small population of orcas I was studying back then.  The book is their story.  Now, the oil industry is proposing to build a pipeline to the BC coast to unload dirty tar sands oil into tankers twice the size of the Exxon Valdez, to ply this toxic cargo up and down Queen Charlotte strait, home to orcas, and salmon, and jellyfish, and seals, and hundreds of other creatures. As I think about this, I suddenly feel the place within my own body, which itself is scarred and compromised by a form of clean-up called chemotherapy and radiation.  A place I love still and call home despite its grave injuries, its altered face.

I wrote this poem about the lamb, and I don’t know, maybe it says something about all of these troubles, and the impulse to take them in (not on).  Poet Mary Ruefle writes that “poetry happens when one lowers their voice.”  Or raises it.  “But the prayer of the lowered register no longer has a chance of being heard, has abandoned that chance – ‘given up,’ we say – yet retains the desire to speak, and I think these are the prayers addressed to god, who has become a singular absence; there is no one in the next seat; the ether becomes an ear.”  We become ears and bodies to one another.  We listen.  We embody.  We bear.  We pray to a god called trade wind, or scar, or as Erin’s poem title puts it “up there toward a winter sky.”

May our shoulders be strong.  But may our hearts be stronger.

2.3.2013 Prayer

Jess brought down the lamb

this morning, the orphan, she’d

shorn, shampooed her white coat

so it bristled away from her skin

like an old marine’s brush-cut,

spruced as though for church, and

it’s true, it was Sunday. Pink showed

through the sparse hairs at her ears

and underbelly, at the nascent

udder, nipples, she was used to

the bottle, the nuzzle against

Jess’s neck, now she nibbles

the kamani, dead electric fence

wire, testing everything for a live

current. She lingered, Jess, reluctant

to leave the lamb she’d nursed,

half-orphan herself, father found

dead in his truck at his favorite haunt,

old sugar cane railbed along the coast

at Mahukona last fall, his heart

given out, given over.  He wanted to be

tossed into the ocean. Jess put up

a cross on the cliff edge and someone

pushed it off, and now, she says,

you see it bumping into the stones,

in and out of sight, an apparition,

just like he wanted. She lives in

his house, painted the kitchen plum,

works at Holy Bakery rolling out

pie crusts.  She brought down the lamb,

collared, leashed, and now she bleats,

bumping into the other sheep, the fence,

perplexed. What am I? With the yearlings,

she ducks the wire, wanders on the lawn,

and the farmer smacks her rump, yells, go on,

you’re a sheep. The flock grazes in

the lower pasture, sometimes nickering

to call her down, but she won’t come,

she lies alone under the ironwood. 

And I sit here listening to her incessant

keening, but doing nothing because

they don’t understand trouble, do they,

not like us, they are only animals.