Poetry in George Eastman's Garden

Poetry in George Eastman's Garden Gail Hosking Gilberg Ijumped into Sally Adams's swimming pool with all my clothes on the autumn afternoon the doctor called me with the test results. There didn't seem to be any other thing worth doing. Had an audience stood around Sally's pool, they might have said now there's a crazy, wild lady. What's with her? Coming up for air, I would have whispered cancer. And someone in the crowd would have nodded as ifhe knew all along. My husband is sitting with a friend's dead body in a Peruvian synagogue when I get the test results, and I wonder for days just how I will tell him of the news when he returns. Do I tell him immediately in the airport or while I'm driving home? Should I blurt it out in one sentence, or should I build the scene beginning with the mammogram? I'm not sure of anything anymore . / racefrom this sensation to that nerve ending, I write in myjournal. I can't think to write. I strip wallpaper instead, wash clothes, and walkfor miles. I want to he alone; I want to he with people. I want to walk out of this story. I go to a neighbor's studio to pass the time, to see a familiar face, and to leave the confines of my house. But when I see my neighbor, I burst into tears and lean on his shoulder. He tries to console me, but there isn't much one can say. At a desk in the corner of his photography studio, I attempt to write an essay, but nothing comes. I feel like I'm somewhere between tiny cells I can't see and all the losses that I have known or will know someday. It's a place without words or direction. I take to poetry instead, and for a few minutes I fill with a momentary sense of wholeness. That night I pick my husband up at the airport after his delayed midnight flight. The moment I see him I feel a tension in the air—part exhaustion, part a need to have a parent show up and not a partner who needs my attention . We don't speak much as we pick up his suitcase and make our way to 2 Fourth Genre the parked car. It was a tough week, I sigh as we drive towards home. He looks over at me as ifto say what could be worse than sitting with a dead body in Peru? In as few words as possible I tell him ofthe routine mammogram and its results. He sits quietly on the other side of the car, and for an odd moment I think him angry with me. I see, he says. This husband of mine, this man who I fell in love with because of his words, suddenly has none. In the days that follow, I can do nothing but sit and read poetry in George Eastman's sunken garden amongst the fall pink and white anemones. Just blocks from my house, I find his stone steps behind the International Museum of Photography. Eastman, the entrepreneur of Kodak, once created these grape arbors with shady vines circling around his lawn of smooth grass. I stretch out in the middle and read poetry aloud as if this were my own private garden. I picture a fellow writer sitting on one of the large rocks along the garden's edge and winking at me as he takes notes for this story. I smile back, glad that someone else is doing the writing . Here among the leaves that soon will turn colors and die, I read Robert Frost: Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and he whole again beyond confusion. As the sun comes out between the ginkgo leaves and sits right above me, I read Seamus Heaney who says that poetry is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. I read James Tate who convinces me that poetry's haunted silences let us peer between the cracks into the other world where the unspoken rests in darkness...