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June 21st, 2006Save as PDF
For the next couple of weeks, I’ll be on vacation, biking around in Austria and the Czech Republic. Whenever I travel, I always bring along way too many books, thinking I’ll have plenty of leisure time (it’s a vacation, right?) in which to stretch out and read. But cycling can be strenuous and then at the end of the day you reward yourself with a big meal to replace all those valuable calories you burned up and some wine to help you not notice that your legs are sore and your feet are killing you. And then you go straight to bed without reading. I should probably stick to a couple of page-turners for the plane and a guide book or two.
This year, while shopping for vacation reading I won’t read, I picked up a copy of 100 Essential Modern Poems, edited by Jay Parini. I’ve been cheating, reading it now rather than saving it for the trip. All for the best, since it’s hardcover and a little heavy for travel. Plus, of course, I actually have the energy and time for it now.
If the poetry you see in The New Yorker has turned you off contemporary verse — or if you just want a one-volume collection of the best poems written in the past 100 years, you should buy this book. You will probably be amazed at how many of these poems you already know, even if you thought you didn’t know (or like) much contemporary poetry. Parini’s introduction is concise and persuasive as he tells us how and why he chose the poems he did. The poems, he says, are "memorable: what the poets say is expressed in extraordinarily well-chosen words, in striking images and arresting metaphors, turns of phrase that stick — language one not only keeps in mind but takes to heart, and might want to learn (as the idiom has it) by heart."
One of the poems is by my late friend and poetry mentor, Bill Matthews. I am so pleased that one of Bill’s poems was selected. It deals with a terrible, difficult subject, his wife’s cancer. But you should read it.
Dire Cure “First, do no harm,” the Hippocratic
Oath begins, but before she might enjoy
such balm, the doctors had to harm her tumor.
It was large, rare, and so anomalous
in its behavior that at first they mis-
diagnosed it. “Your wife will die of it
within a year.” But in ten days or so
I sat beside her bed with hot and sour
soup and heard an intern congratulate
her on her new diagnosis: a children’s
cancer (doesn’t that possessive break
your heart?) had possessed her. I couldn’t stop
personifying it. Devious, dour,
it had a clouded heart, like Iago’s.
It loved disguise. It was a garrison
in a captured city, a bad horror film
(The Blob), a stowaway, an inside job.
If I could make it be like something else,
I wouldn’t have to think of it as what,
in fact, it was: part of my lovely wife.
Next, then, chemotherapy. Her hair fell
out in tufts, her color dulled, she sat laced
to bags of poison she endured somewhat
better than her cancer cells could, though not
by much. And indeed, the cancer cells waned
more slowly than the “chemical cocktails”
(one the bright color of Campari), as the chemo
nurses called them, dripped into her. There were
three hundred days of this: a week inside
the hospital and two weeks out, the fierce
elixirs percolating all the while.
She did five weeks of radiation, too,
Monday to Friday like a stupid job.
She wouldn’t eat the food the hospital
wheeled in. “Pureed fish” and “minced fish” were worth,
I thought, a sharp surge of food snobbery.
But she’d grown averse to it all – the nurses’
crepe soles’ muffled squeaks along the hall,
the filtered air, the smothered urge to read,
the fear, the perky visitors, flowers
she’d not been sent when she was well, the room-
mate (what do “semiprivate” and “extra
virgin” have in common?) who died, the nights
she wept and sweated faster than the tubes
could moisten her with lurid poison.
One chemotherapy veteran, six
years in remission, chanced on her former
chemo nurse at a bus stop and threw up.
My wife’s tumor has not come back.
I like to think of it in Tumor Hell,
Strapped to a dray, flat as a deflated
football, bleak and nubbly like a poorly
ironed truffle. There’s one tense in Tumor Hell,
forever, or what we call the present.
For that long the flaccid tumor marinates
in lurid toxins. Tumor Hell Clinic
is, it turns out, a teaching hospital.
Every century or so, the way
we’d measure it, a chief doc brings a pack
of students round. They run some simple tests:
surge current through the tumor, batter it
with mallets, push a woodplane across its
pebbled hide and watch a scurf of tumor-
pelt kink loose from it, impale it, strafe it
with lye and napalm. There might be nothing
left in there but a still space surrounded
by a carapace. “This one is nearly
dead,” the chief doc says. “What’s the cure for that?”
The students know: “Kill it slower, of course.”
They sprinkle it with rock salt and move on.
Here on the aging earth the tumor’s gone.
My wife is hale, though wary, and why not?
Once you’ve had cancer, you don’t get headaches
anymore, you get brain tumors, at least
until the aspirin kicks in. Her hair’s back,
her weight, her appetite. “And what about you?”
friends ask me. First the fear felt like sudden
weightlessness: I couldn’t steer and couldn’t stay.
I couldn’t concentrate: surely my spit would
dry before I could slather a stamp.
I made a list of things to do next day
before I went to bed, slept like a cork,
woke to no more memory of last night’s
list than smoke has of fire, made a new list,
began to do the things on it, wept, paced,
berated myself, drove to the hospital,
and brought my wife food from the take-out joints
that ring a hospital as surely as
brothels surround a gold strike. I drove home
rancid with anger at her luck and mine –
anger that filled me the same way nature
hates a vacuum. “This must be hell for you,”
some said. Hell’s not other people: Sartre
was wrong about that, too. L’enfer, c’est moi?
I’ve got the ego for it. There’d be
no hell if Dante hadn’t built a model
of his rage so well, and he contrived
to get exiled from it, for it was Florence.
Why would I live in hell? I love New York.
Some even said the tumor and fierce cure
were harder on the caregiver – yes, they
said “caregiver” – than on the “sick person.”
They were wrong who said those things. Of course
I hated it, but some of “it” was me –
the self-pity I allowed myself,
the brave poses I struck. The rest was dire
threat my wife met with moral stubbornness,
terror, rude jokes, nausea, you name it.
No, let her think of its name and never
say it, as if it were the same of God.
June 21st, 2006 at 11:23 am
I enjoyed, and at the same time hated, “Dire Cure”. You accurately, and movingly, described the experiences and emotions we went through when my first wife was diagnosed with lung cancer, particularly my overwhelming feeling of helplessness, and distraction. These were followed by relief when she entered five years of remission. But then it became even worse….
June 21st, 2006 at 12:47 pm
I sometimes think I want a book of poetry beside my bed, and then my courage fails at the bookstore & I wonder who I think I am. So I’ll buy this book & I thank you for the tip.
June 21st, 2006 at 8:34 pm
Your mentor’s poem was chillingly realistic, it touched a chord, my having just followed a friend through all those treatments. And, it also made me think about how I also in general avoid poetry, but it can be so evocative, your blogs are welcomed.