my mother's cancer:

31 Terri Brown-Davidson my mother's cancer: less real than the Market Street bag lady's shopping cart of trash-treasure and rags in a bank-haven doorway. What will I feel when my mother dies? This distancing fear swimming up to engulf as I wolf down fries at McDonald's and my husband strokes my forearm, kneads fingers white as paste. Day by day our lives unravel. The metaphor's inept. Imagine the lacquered surface of a painting, half dotty Seurat, half Jackson Pollock with its rages of black and red dribbles, as the dailiness that attacks us. As the splatters chip, as the canvas lightens to an undercoat that will never glow white, we accept, gratefully, the gray. At the San Francisco Airport we board the passenger walkway, our baggage on its belt, the arcane carousel horses' black, flared nostrils and manes dragging past, yanked backwards to battle. Home because "we can't do anything," I puzzle over what we return to: not the soiled coffee cups in the sink, the half-painted abstract expressionism on my bedroom easel, the splats and dribbles mounting to a confusion of days listening to a litany of strident 32 the minnesota review chemotherapy complaints, to a few whispers about the nausea that shoves her over the toilet. I suck at my coffee. Layer my painting's nakedness. Stained red, I try to remember when I lay in her womb, the walls' lit Chinese lanterns a washed-out, crimson shine, the darkness bright as white trees with their afterglow of moon, try to remember her voice wafting through layers of flesh as she sang. I remember nothing. In waking dreams, riding the walkway, I snag my highheels in the slats, the nubs dragging me under the slow-spinning belt to a black underchasm, the family I love circling beckoning beyond the coagulating red-oil surface that is too dense to reverse, the void we inhabit comfortingly black though I often think how much easier it would be if she'd never been born. ...