a radio was on.

They call it a cancerversary. If you know me, you know how I feel about that word.  Still. My body needed a voice a year ago, and my life has become a poem in this long, flash in the pan year since my nurse-practitioner wept as she told me I had stage four cancer. This date weighs on me, like the rocks Virginia Woolf lined her pockets with--it's heavy, inscribed in this internal calendar I keep close to my heart, the dates fluttering in the air like moths around a light--the mapping of my prognosis onto the calendar (on average, my oncologist said, patients respond to Tarceva for 13 months; on average, my oncologist said, patients respond to the second line treatment for 9 months. (My life starts to feel like a play.  The list of characters: the nurse-practitioner, the oncologist, and then later in the play, the rabbi, the yoga teacher, the social worker, the stricken cancer patients, God)).  I know that 22 months doesn't mean everything, or even, anything but the number shadow

They call it a cancerversary. If you know me, you know how I feel about that word.  Still. My body needed a voice a year ago, and my life has become a poem in this long, flash in the pan year since my nurse-practitioner wept as she told me I had stage four cancer. This date weighs on me, like the rocks Virginia Woolf lined her pockets with--it's heavy, inscribed in this internal calendar I keep close to my heart, the dates fluttering in the air like moths around a light--the mapping of my prognosis onto the calendar (on average, my oncologist said, patients respond to Tarceva for 13 months; on average, my oncologist said, patients respond to the second line treatment for 9 months. (My life starts to feel like a play.  The list of characters: the nurse-practitioner, the oncologist, and then later in the play, the rabbi, the yoga teacher, the social worker, the stricken cancer patients, God)).  I know that 22 months doesn't mean everything, or even, anything but the number sh

It's just remarkable, said the old lady, what photos this i-phone is capable of taking.  Forgive my astonishment at the beauty captured almost carelessly with my phone. I date back to 35 mm film for the serious photographers, which was decidedly not me (and I'm not even going to get into the phones--just one image: the stretched out cord of the phone as is snaked from my parents' bedroom into the spare room, where I could hide for privacy for my really important calls.  And maps, good grief.  Okay, I digress).  I had a disc camera---anyone still with me? And of course, my sister had a Polaroid Instamatic camera.  Just pause on that for a moment.  The thrill of that camera, with its expensive film and horrible production values, was that you could see the photo instantly.  You clicked, and it whirred, and then a blurry photo of you and two of the friends at your seventh grade sleepover party appeared in the frame. This was before midnight, when you still considered these gir

It's just remarkable, said the old lady, what photos this i-phone is capable of taking.  Forgive my astonishment at the beauty captured almost carelessly with my phone. I date back to 35 mm film for the serious photographers, which was decidedly not me (and I'm not even going to get into the phones--just one image: the stretched out cord of the phone as is snaked from my parents' bedroom into the spare room, where I could hide for privacy for my really important calls.  And maps, good grief.  Okay, I digress).  I had a disc camera---anyone still with me? And of course, my sister had a Polaroid Instamatic camera.  Just pause on that for a moment.  The thrill of that camera, with its expensive film and horrible production values, was that you could see the photo instantly.  You clicked, and it whirred, and then a blurry photo of you and two of the friends at your seventh grade sleepover party appeared in the frame. This was before midnight, when you still considered these g

On the outside, our lives are so vulnerable to transience, sometimes we experience our days as so fleeting. Regardless of the contents of each day, our days of tremendous sadness, when someone dies, when we are leveled by the actions of our country, our days of beauty, when we revel in our newborn's face, the location of intimacy, each day empties and vanishes, and our time on earth unspools.  That which seems to pass, though, is transfigured.  Sometimes, that past time is transfigured and housed in the temple of memory. I thought of this yesterday when I came back to a weeping Elijah, in his bed in the just dark time of nine o'clock, an hour after he had been kissed and left to find his way to sleep. He had dreamed something hard and his head hurt, and I tucked him in again and patted his back. He relaxed and he turned onto his back, his arms crossed behind his head.  Be still my heart.  When Elijah was still inside of me, he was pushed into a corner of my womb and his arms en

On the outside, our lives are so vulnerable to transience, sometimes we experience our days as so fleeting. Regardless of the contents of each day, our days of tremendous sadness, when someone dies, when we are leveled by the actions of our country, our days of beauty, when we revel in our newborn's face, the location of intimacy, each day empties and vanishes, and our time on earth unspools.  That which seems to pass, though, is transfigured.  Sometimes, that past time is transfigured and housed in the temple of memory. I thought of this yesterday when I came back to a weeping Elijah, in his bed in the just dark time of nine o'clock, an hour after he had been kissed and left to find his way to sleep. He had dreamed something hard and his head hurt, and I tucked him in again and patted his back. He relaxed and he turned onto his back, his arms crossed behind his head.  Be still my heart.  When Elijah was still inside of me, he was pushed into a corner of my womb and his arms

A poem for my support group for metastatic cancer, Harvard, Massachusetts, June 2018 Today as we gathered to say goodbye we heard a wood thrush's piercing trill separate the moment of silence we use to depart  into before and after. I did not hope, That is God , much, as I was deeply contemplating how much I loved you,  my beloved strangers, as we come closer to truths about dying, and thus of course, about living, than any end of June on the coast of Massachusetts. My words are not veiled, not the kinds of words one would confuse for others, but I could not alone call for myself the complete beauty of birdsong in the still air between us, but only dared to with the strength in numbers we afford us. Sometimes it seems to me, these days, as if no experience is true until I have written about it.  I know when it's time to write: a poem, a journal, a story, and it's more than a way of recording words against time, but a way of taking my own life out and looking at it, and livi

A poem for my support group for metastatic cancer, Harvard, Massachusetts, June 2018 Today as we gathered to say goodbye we heard a wood thrush's piercing trill separate the moment of silence we use to depart  into before and after. I did not hope, That is God , much, as I was deeply contemplating how much I loved you,  my beloved strangers, as we come closer to truths about dying, and thus of course, about living, than any end of June on the coast of Massachusetts. My words are not veiled, not the kinds of words one would confuse for others, but I could not alone call for myself the complete beauty of birdsong in the still air between us, but only dared to with the strength in numbers we afford us. Sometimes it seems to me, these days, as if no experience is true until I have written about it.  I know when it's time to write: a poem, a journal, a story, and it's more than a way of recording words against time, but a way of taking my

One less than fun thing you can do when you find yourself around people dying of cancer, or living with cancer, as Kyle likes to say, is to apologize for what you are about to say and then say it anyhow.  The sentence goes something like, I shouldn't complain around you (what with your pending mortality and constant companion of pain, you with your sudden demise of your career, and the promise of clinical trials and hospice in your near term), but and then you do. You tell me that your boss is impossible, or your spouse is annoying, or you have a summer cold you simply can't get rid of, or your mother is driving you crazy by calling you all the time. You have laundry piling up.  You have bills to pay.  You know you shouldn't complain in front of me, because I've got it so much worse, but we're such good friends, or you forgot, just for a second, that I had cancer, and the complaint was out of your mouth before you realized and so you sweep up the mess you made at th

One less than fun thing you can do when you find yourself around people dying of cancer, or living with cancer, as Kyle likes to say, is to apologize for what you are about to say and then say it anyhow.  The sentence goes something like, I shouldn't complain around you (what with your pending mortality and constant companion of pain, you with your sudden demise of your career, and the promise of clinical trials and hospice in your near term), but and then you do. You tell me that your boss is impossible, or your spouse is annoying, or you have a summer cold you simply can't get rid of, or your mother is driving you crazy by calling you all the time. You have laundry piling up.  You have bills to pay.  You know you shouldn't complain in front of me, because I've got it so much worse, but we're such good friends, or you forgot, just for a second, that I had cancer, and the complaint was out of your mouth before you realized and so you sweep up the mess you made at th

I lived in Clintonville, Ohio when I was a little girl.  Clintonville is a neighborhood in north-central Columbus, Ohio, bounded by railroad tracks and Interstate 71, the Olentangy River, and the Glen Echo Ravine.  The town was the center of Clinton Township, named for the forgotten U.S. Vice President George Clinton (he of the Jefferson administration), and was part of the land grants given to Continental Army soldiers in lieu of pensions in what used to be Wyandot Indian territory.  During the American Revolution,  the Wyandots fought for the British against the Americans, and when the British surrendered, they were left to fight the Americans on their own.  White people regarded the Wyandot as fierce warriors.  They were defeated at the beautifully named Battle of Fallen Timbers.  Beautiful in the same way that the phrase trail of tears is beautiful.  Beautiful in a kind of poetics that hides pain and responsibility.  The Wyandot surrendered most of their land in Ohio with the signi

I lived in Clintonville, Ohio when I was a little girl.  Clintonville is a neighborhood in north-central Columbus, Ohio, bounded by railroad tracks and Interstate 71, the Olentangy River, and the Glen Echo Ravine.  The town was the center of Clinton Township, named for the forgotten U.S. Vice President George Clinton (he of the Jefferson administration), and was part of the land grants given to Continental Army soldiers in lieu of pensions in what used to be Wyandot Indian territory.  During the American Revolution,  the Wyandots fought for the British against the Americans, and when the British surrendered, they were left to fight the Americans on their own.  White people regarded the Wyandot as fierce warriors.  They were defeated at the beautifully named Battle of Fallen Timbers.  Beautiful in the same way that the phrase trail of tears is beautiful.  Beautiful in a kind of poetics that hides pain and responsibility.  The Wyandot surrendered most of their land in Ohio with the s