We are stardust, we are golden or Rilke's elegies

"... We are billion year old carbon" by Joni Mitchell. 

Image courtesy of Hubblesite.org

The lab results came back.

My dad's cancer was supposed to have been cut out of his lung and life was supposed to continue as it always had. The tumor was supposed to be no more than a hard, tiny rock that would be tossed into the trash. Instead the cancer is like dark matter, dark energy, drawing life away.

I spiral into a place that neither shines nor reflects.

Once

for each thing, only once. 

Once, and no more. And we too,

once. Never again. But this

once, to have been, though only once,

to have been an earthly thing – seems irrevocable.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Ninth Elegy

Lung cancer can spread into the neck and cause a droopy eyelid and sunken eye. It can grow into the esophagus and cause painful swallowing. It can twist itself around the heart and cause irregular beating. Or it can travel through the blood stream to the brain, the liver, the bones. My dad's cancer was found in his lymph nodes, bean-shaped filters that trap foreign particles and are part of the immune system.

I tell everyone I know. I tell everyone I don't know. I tell because I want the news to spread faster than the rogue cells, because I want to imagine that a thousand individual fleeting thoughts focused on my dad's cancer will slow it, halt it, hell, why not erase it?

Want to know the prognosis for lung cancer?

It sucks.

For we, when we feel, evaporate: oh, we

breathe ourselves out and away: from ember to ember,

yielding us fainter fragrance. Then someone may say to us:

‘Yes, you are in my blood ... 

 -- Rilke, The Second Elegy

Cancer is going to change my family's story and it makes me scared and angry. We -- my family -- die from heart attacks. It is written in our genetic code that more than likely death will come with a slow thickening of pipes until nothing but a trickle of blood remains and the heart gasps, shudders and breaks.

I don't want my dad to die. Okay, I know we're all dying, that each change is a sort of death to prepare us for the act of dying, but I don't want him to die. He's a good, strong man and the world's a better place because he's here, so he can't go.

And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry

of a darkened sobbing

Rilke, The First Elegy

I cradle the phone against my ear, bite my lip, and rock back and forth as I listen to my dad describe the chemotherapy's toxic concoction of drugs that would burn his veins, so doctors will put a port into his neck. He tells me another biopsy has been scheduled and a brain scan because doctors are still trying to define what and where they're fighting the cancer. Yet even as the ground falls from under him, he is strong. This is his life right now, fighting cancer, and he's ready for it, wants the fight. Had the cancer ended with the single surgery he said he would've felt a little cheated. Bring it on.

 Engraving of Orion from Johann Bayer's Uranometria, 1603 

(US Naval Observatory Library)

I want to live my life like my father, with courage, but I'm stuck in the empty, gravity-sucking space that makes up most of our universe.

When I was a kid and my dad took me camping, he'd hunch over a constellation wheel and then squint at the sky, find some faint cluster of stars and call me over. Then we'd both stare up into the night sky and he'd point out Big Bear and Little Bear, the North Star, Scorpio and the Pleiades, the star-studded belt of Orion, the hunter.

But it's not story, but science that comforts me now. Strength lies in fact, not in prayer, and I think that's okay. Knowing that we are just specks upon specks floating in a lonely corner of an ever-expanding universe doesn't make me feel hopeless because the universe is in us. You, me, my dad, the cancer are composed of the same ingredients -- hydrogen, oxygen and carbon -- in roughly the same proportion as the recipe for the universe.

Does the cosmic space,

we dissolve into, taste of us then? Do the Angels

really only take back what is theirs, what has streamed out of them,

or is there sometimes, as if by an oversight, something

of our being, as well? 

Rilke, The Second Elegy

The other night the rain stopped and the clouds lifted, stars peered down from the heavens, and from my kitchen door I traced the outline of the Big Dipper. I wasn't filled with hope or peace or fear or sadness or anger.

I just was.

Happy man on a happy day

Photo courtesy of Conor Keller.

Today's the last day of my thirties, 
and of the aspects of my life I can control, 
I wouldn't change a thing. 

-- Marcel Levy 

Breathless

Photo courtesy of just.jim.

The weekend's whirlwind trip back to Nevada included three trips to the hospital, a sleepover with my girlfriends, a tea party for thirty, a trek out to the homestead and then we were back in the air again. As the ground rushed away from us and we headed into clouds, Ivan clutched the arms of his chair, leaned back and uttered one word:

Whoa.

You said it, cowboy.

Air

Photo courtesy of Patrick Wilkin.  

I am listening to myself breathe, air rushing in and out of my nose, my chest expanding, contracting, until my concentration leaves me light headed, dizzy with emotions. Wonder, dread, fear, hope rise and fall like hot air balloons.

Somewhere, a doctor breaks my father's rib and carves out a piece of lung sick with cancer.

I sip tea that is strong and bitter, fold clothes, wait.

Have I ever told you that I once held a lung? It was a small set of warm, pale pink lungs that minutes earlier were inside the chest of a rabbit but were now cupped in my child hands. My dad was butchering a rabbit and was explaining to me the animal's innards as he pulled them out. I held the wind pipe up to my lips, breathed and I remember how strangely firm the lung felt, not at all like a light and hollow balloon.

For more than a year doctors couldn't figure out why my dad kept coughing; it turned out he was trying to hack out a tumor. Twice, yesterday, my mother texted with updates.

Message number one: No news. Doing well... just w8ing. I'll let u kno.
 
Message number two: Only did lobectomy - removed lower lobe of rt lung + 1/2doz lymph nodes. Lab results on nodes due nxt week. Going 2 ICU 2nite. Doc says he is doing well. I'll keep u posted.

It's easier to imagine the journey of that piece of tissue than to see in my mind's-eye my father sleeping in a hospital bed, missing one-fifth of his lungs. I imagine a brightly lit operating table and a metal bowl nearby, sterile, antiseptic, cool to the touch even through surgical gloves. Someone drops the chunk of lung into it.

Later, when the surgery is finished and the technicians are on break, they toss the lung to a crow hanging out in one of the cottonwood trees behind the hospital. The crow swallows the lung and catches my father's cough.

It makes the world go 'round

 Shel Silverstein's "Hug O' War."

Two-year-old Ivan and I were motoring our way through a morning of errands when we passed two men in their 20s, loping along with rounded shoulder and skinny leg.

"I wuv those guys," Ivan said.

I glanced back at the men who were now glancing back at us.

"You love them?"

"Yeah."

I shrugged.

They laughed.

And everyone had a better day because of it.

 

I've been listening this tribute to Shel Silverstein for two weeks, straight. Here's where you can preview the entire album. And while we're singing on the subject, why not learn about the mathematics of poetry, enjoy Seattle poet John Olson's love of lines, or pick up some tips from budding author Caroline Starr Rose on telling a story in free verse.

Bilocation or returning home

by-lo-kay-shun

noun

Familiar hills surround Silver Springs, Nevada.

1. The supposed phenomenon of being in two places simultaneously.

I'm thinking about home, about going home to the desert where a small trailer sits anchored in the sand and bleached by the sun. The wind has blasted off paint, exposing metal that twinkles dully like a dime on the sidewalk. I pick up the dime, rub away the dust and look for the year. It is 1980.

I place my hand on a splintered railing and climb a set of steps that lead to the trailer's front door. I'm careful to avoid the nails protruding from the old planks held together by hammer and story. This is where my sister tumbled down and deadened her front teeth. And this crack between step and trailer was where the coyote-clawed cat hid, died and wasn't found for a month.

I step inside, onto vinyl flooring whose brick pattern is patchy and in some places worn clean away by years of sand ground into it. Like those trails that cut through grass and ignore sidewalk, a serpentine path is etched into the floor beginning at the front door and winding its way between kitchen table and stove before veering left and disappearing down the hall. Here more stories lurk. Stories held in the books lined up on hall shelves, and stories held in my mind.

But I don't walk down the hall. Instead, I sit at the oval kitchen table that also shows signs of wear. The wood veneer is yellowed and faded where plates are set daily. Within arms reach of the table is the counter and drawers, which open stubbornly and if yanked too hard will tumble out and send forks, spoons and knives clattering to the floor. At this table, I'd meet my mom for late night cups of cocoa and towers of buttered toast. I'd wake and wander into the kitchen, perch on a chair with knees drawn up to my chest and my flannel nightgown tented around me. As I'd dunk toast, we'd talk. Then with a stomach full and warm, I'd wander back to bed. I don't sleep, but lay looking out the window at the stars and the dusty line of the Milky Way. A meteor burns across the darkness.

In her mother's house.

Seven hundred miles and thirty years away, my own daughter and I are sharing hot chocolate and  nighttime conversation as we drive home from a meeting. It is a moment of bilocation between mother and daughter, everything at once familiar and foreign, like when I return to the desert. The trailer is still cemented in sand, but the insides are gutted, table and floor have been replaced, dark walls are painted light. I am a different mother and she a different daughter than what my own mother and I shared, but still we're here, together, wrapped in the night. She leans her head against the car window. Outside, a star gleams dull as a dime then falls from the sky.

Homage to Sendak and an ushering in of the flu

Illustration from "Alligators All Around" by Maurice Sendak, whose book "Chicken Soup with Rice: A book of months" inspired me despite my sinus headache.

In October,
I've been host
to coughs,
fevers and
a runny nose.
Soup's cured all
but the nasal drip, post.
Sneezing once.
Hacking twice.
Cold season sure ain't nice.

Maunder or writing about writing

mon-duhr
verb

1. To talk incoherently; to speak in a rambling manner.
2. To talk or wander aimlessly.

We all have favorite tools we grab when a job needs finishing. When making soup, I grab one wooden spoon out of a canister full of them because I like the heft of its handle and the shape of its bowl, perfect for slurping from before adjusting the seasoning. I drink my morning coffee from one cup, my afternoon tea from another. Again and again, I reach for the same things because they're useful, predictable, because I'm trying to recapture an experience, like the time I stirred a pot of soup that turned out fabulous, or sipped from a cup and the sun shone all day, or wrote with a certain pen and the sentences sang.

My favorite pen to write with is Paper Mate Flair with a porous point in black ink. The pen is sleek, lightweight, unadorned and unidentifiable but for the company's name stamped into the tiny metal clip on the cap. It's basically a marker, the ink is easy to read, the tip glides effortlessly across the page. The Flair once was a standard in every office supply store, where it came not only in black, but also blue, red and green, and was sold in sets of two or four. But the Flair is harder to find now and my latest box of twelve had to be ordered online for $22.

My favorite notebook is the Moleskin. I carry a pocket one to jot down grocery lists, doctor appointments, the size of my vacuum's replacement bags (RR), instructions on how to knit a sock, bits of eavesdropping, books I want to read and so on. To scribble down longer thoughts, partial stories and poetry, I recently switched from a spiral-bound college notebook to a (5.25 x 8.5 in.) Moleskin Volant and am pleased. The notebook's soft cover folds in two, its pages are large enough so I don't feel cramped while writing, yet the book is small and thin enough to be tucked easily into my backpack or messenger bag. In addition, the sewn binding is far superior to the spiral, which bent, snagged and (most irritating) released its pages.

My habits met with limited success this week: My soup spoon went unused, my morning cup produced only sunny afternoons and my trusty pen maundered across lined paper -- while making fried rice (added soy sauce to my grocery list), while stopped at a red light (wondered about the different qualities of rain), and as my son nursed and napped (began an essay about school). Pages were filled with partial thoughts, bouts of self-pity, bits of truth, maybe a lie or two, but no singing, just my mind humming along, aimlessly, happily, writing about nothing much at all.