April Poetry: Chemo

In recognition of Poetry Month, and to celebrate our treasure trove of Orcas Island poets, Orcas Issues is pleased and honored to offer daily poetry during April.

CHEMO
by Laurel Rust

1.
I lie in the brown naugahyde recliner
in a line with six or seven others
like someone with a steerage class ticket
or in love with the elements
facing a floor to ceiling window
where we can see what comes
or goes.

The nurse injects saline, seawater
like the body’s, but colder.
She hangs bags on the hooks
of the IV pole.
It is strange to be wearing
streetclothes for this.

There are things we take in,
knowing and unknowing. I’m freighted:
fugitives, ballast, witnesses,
bilge, life-ring, my body
grown beyond knowing
what in its long passageways
to permit. Outside
seems a glacier of light.

2.
The others have been here
longer than I. We’re quiet,
absorbed in our recliners,
know each other as ourselves.
I listen to the nurse give each of us
a name as the liquids drip in,
bead by bead, and we drift off.

A big man with a magenta chest
who can’t speak is in the next recliner,
a tube protruding from his lung
like a drinking straw.
The nurse suctions his trach tube.
He carefully wipes the wet corners
of his mouth with a plaid handkerchief,
only his eyes clamoring.

A young woman with artificial hair
like a stiff hem hanging
from her head scarf
reads a book on statistics,
turning the pages with delicate hands
and ultraviolet fingernails.
A white-haired woman naps.
At the end of the row
the nurse’s young daughter
on a half-day free of school
wears headphones, her legs jittering.
Someone in the corridor
orders a sixpack of platelets.
I reach and pluck grit
from my eyelashes, then remember
I have none, am slick as larvae.

The nurse dons gloves and gown
to give me taxol. I’m relieved
she’s protected. I let my fear unwind
like a mooring line,
ask for a heated blanket
and stitch a quilt square of snowberries
for my son, until my eyes can no longer
adjust to distance.

3.
Last night when I woke
to the alarm in the dark
and took my decadron, Orion’s belt
was tangled in the hedged firs.

As I left the house early
and looked back, all of Orion
was spread in a vast
mottled darkness only the mind
could constellate.

I’ve learned to tolerate
the senselessness of a body
awash in toxins: fingers and feet
numb, the frail bellows of the breath,
legs rubbery or stiff with bone-pain,
cold in the warm days and burning
in the cold nights, my own smells
unfamiliar. The view anywhere
is stripped of particularities.

Has longing and its wild procreations
done this, unleashed rogue, profligate cells?
Have I wanted too much,
thought the stranger at the door
an angel of God, entertained him
unaware?

3.
One by one, the others leave.
The nurse ties up each bag
marked BIOHAZARD. I lie
in the hold of the recliner
awash in the body’s contradictory
pulse of will to live and its small seeds
of death: its armatures, articulations,
its nonchalance. Nothing lasts
as long as its reverberation.