When my cell phone rings at 11:37 p.m., I immediately think, "Who died?" I don't expect good news at that time of the night. On the other hand, if the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy calls my in early October, I can be fairly confident I'll be receiving good news.
Sharon Olds deals with possibly bad news . . .
The Line
by: Sharon Olds
When we understood it might be cancer,
I lay down beside you in the night,
my palm resting in the groove of your chest,
the rachis of a leaf. There was no question of
making love: deep inside my body that
small hard lump. In the half-light
of my half-life, my hand in the beautiful
sharp cleft of your chest, the valley of the
shadow of death,
there was only the present moment, and as you
slept in the quiet, I watched you as one watches
a newborn child, aware each moment of the
miracle, the line that has been crossed
out of the darkness.
There's probably no more devastating news than a cancer diagnosis. I remember the day I received a phone call from one of my siblings, telling me that our sister had lymphoma of the brain, with doctors giving her very little chance for survival. I walked around, not really hearing or seeing anything for hours. To borrow Olds' metaphor, a line had been crossed, and I could never go back over it. I was stuck on the other side.
It pretty much snowed all day today. I didn't really do a whole lot besides shovel a little, practice for a few worship services at various churches, and write poems. I didn't receive any news, good or bad. (Confession: I've avoided all social media. I needed a break from the President and Republicans.) I am calmer right now than I've been all week.
You see, I find myself falling into an old habit from 2016: scrolling and scrolling through newsfeeds, becoming more and more horrified with every appearance of the color orange. It literally began to make me physically ill back then. I'm not going to bury my head in the sand for the next four years, but I'm also not going to climb onboard the Trump Unlimited Railroad every day, either.
Instead, I try to focus on what's in front of me: birds, my sleeping puppy, ice-shagged pines, crimson winterberries. I fill my mind with these tangible, concrete pleasures, and it makes me less . . . crazy.
Saint Marty wrote a poem for tonight, based on following prompt from The Daily Poet, that focuses on the present moment:
It's the birthday of Elizabeth Bishop, one of the most well-regarded poets of the 20th century. Bishop's forte is looking closely at the world's creatures and sharing them with her reader in a painterly fashion: palm trees are fistfuls of limp fish-skeletons and a dead hen's wing is as thin as tissue paper. For today's poem, take a walk around your block and notice the small and seemingly insignificant things you pass (a leaf, a beetle, a patch of poppies), as well as your neighbors and/or their dogs, cats, and children. If you are up for it, take notes. Either way, return to your desk to describe in vivid detail what you observed.
Bone Cold
by: Martin Achatz
In my backyard,
winter cracked its
knuckles under
my boots--teeth
white as moonlight,
arms bone hard--said
to me, I wish I could be
more like you,
with your fountain
pen and notebook.
If you only knew
how I would give up
everything--the blizzard
of my belly, tundra
of my toes, wind
of my eyelashes--
if I could simply
write one line
of poetry that would
break the heart of summer,
make it understand
how lonely I am
for the lips
of the sun.
