In the Kingdom of the Ditch

Poem on the Anniversary of My Father’s Diagnosis with Pancreatic Cancer

90 Poem on the Anniversary of My Father’s Diagnosis with Pancreatic Cancer The vertical stripe of aspen wrinkles the dense green of the understory with one of the eighty major shades of white. Ferns clump around this light at the base of the tree, and I wish it would brighten the center of my chest where the rhythm has been off-kilter for the past year. How odd it seems that happiness can skitter away into the small door along the baseboard of the body, a cartoon mouse chased by a cartoon cat. I’m still getting smacked with the oversized mallet of my father’s death, and it sounds like a pileated woodpecker hammering at my ears. I hear the stream the topo map showed somewhere in the rhododendron grove toward the bottom of the ridge. I’ll likely find beneath those fronds a cardinal flower, wet and fecund. No doubt spend some time watching its own particular delight drip, drip, drip like a faulty faucet, the continuous play of water carrying all our abstractions—beauty, joy, sorrow—down to the Chesapeake Bay and on out into the heavy undercurrents of the Atlantic. Don’t tell me this plant doesn’t feel ecstatic at the way it’s adorned. No one dresses in drag without a smile. Even if you bite your tongue, blood’s gift of salt remains. Off to the left a cerulean warbler shuffles its sheet music, sends a shaft of light into my aging brain, which as it turns out is better than if my chest had been cracked open to insert a pacemaker. Whitman was right about the body being electric, but after this past year I don’t assume anything anymore. ...