Staging
(Ovarian)
Cancer. In no time, pre-op meds:
a sweet amnesia drip, and one
that means to keep nausea at bay . . .
your IV cocktail almost done,
you’re under Anesthesia’s spell.
One waits, imagining the cut
as neat as metered lines, and then
the careful good look round. Just what
will be exposed? Blest normalcy?
A tumor that the ultrasound,
making close darkness visible,
or that a blood test has not found?
One waits. As afternoon wears on,
your surgeon comes, in scrubs: it all
went well, nothing suspicious seen,
you’re groggy yet with sleep. She’ll call
the lab tomorrow, expedite
what seems to be a routine case—
they’ll section this and that and that,
then you’ll be fully staged.
Now space
and time contract, imploding quite
the green room where they’d taken you—
that operating theater
in which director, cast, and crew
had finished up the matinee—
leaving a microscope’s lit stage.
On it your tissue slides will yield
massed CA cells so underage,
so crudely undeveloped that
they’ve yet to differentiate
themselves. But only in the site
of origin. No spread. Cool Fate,
humane for once, on her way out
lowers the scope’s sharp-focus light.
She’ll do her nails there in the wings
till cued again. You’ll be all right—
authoritatively, as though
this play that is not play will play
another fifty years. Tonight
(applause) the Shades have turned away.
R & R
Laputa? Lost for centuries, of course—
by now, so far off course one might have thought
to find her lurking vainly miles above
an empty Caribbean. Well, the plot
(author unknown, unknowable) requires
a week of R & R, so why not there,
some thirty thousand feet beneath our plane
droning earnestly south? Only despair
would take, mistake her yet for what she is,
one in a chain of floating islands formed
by cloud-cast shadows gray and fraying in
the massive, humid glare. It’s March, no storm
in sight.
Neat trick, to land on land moving
at speed through space, but land we did, and now
we’ve earned our rum, our gin. The poolside bar
swells with doctor-talk exclaiming how,
tomorrow when the meeting’s done, the press
release will spell the end of certain types
of carcinomas. Let it be. Hopped-up,
half-blotto, a young Hippocrates swipes
his credit card and heads for bed. It’s barely
six, the gaudy sky is gone. Offshore,
the island’s one casino ship drifts
idly on the foam, its million brilliant or-
ganelles of light forever fixed on games of chance.
Walking the beach, humming the Muzak of
Laputa, you begin to ruminate:
sudden nightfall, distant war, long love,
and fear, recurrent fear. Life named by nouns.
Swift’s vertigo, and yours. The indignation. And—
thicker, still red—your hair growing back in.
A breeze, its quickened touch. Time’s restless sand.
