The “c” word
Sitting around a dinner table a friend said she knew of nobody who had cancer five years ago but suddenly that is all she keeps hearing about. Another friend at the table said, “It’s your age.” Well it does seem like I keep hearing stories about more people with cancer, that’s terminal, and I think of how cancer still remains one of the most incredible tragic stories of our lifetime. People die from cancer – usually not quickly – but the dying process is drawn out over months and sometimes years.
There is a digital billboard in the Louis Armstrong International Airport that reads, “No one says you have cancer, get over it” – it is an ad about depression and how most feel people have the power to do something about their own afflictions such as depression, alcoholism, etc.
Someone close is dealing with a friend who is dying of cancer right now. It is heart wrenching to watch the inevitable slide towards death, the dissolution of the body, and the mind and spirit following it out the door. SO much for rage rage rage against the dying light – does anyone really have the power to stave off death?
October in Vermont
Endings are always more difficult than beginnings.
Don’t ask me why I remember
lying alone in the grass at dusk, gored
by the tiny horns of snails,
filaments of spider-silk like threads
of starlight across my eyes. I was listening
to the orange and blue
leaves explain my countless lives,
so many that I could not make out a single word.
Their colors wound each of us
in unnameable, and different ways.
By day they are the splayed hands of children
held up in self-wonderment.
At night they are the flutterings of dying birds.
Lighting my way with a dandelion
I hold in one hand like a sparkler,
in the other a jar of fireflies,
I make my way through the forking darkness
as the leafless trees climb the night like stairs.
The Southern Review
Summer 2009