Chemo Session Six, and: The History of Air, Part 2, and: Round Trip

Chemo Session Six

Translucence, organ-soft, bagged on its steeltrident: drip of orphaned light; amber blister

draining to clarity. Healing is the sutureof poison and poison; the body, cups of sand

castled at shoreline. All morning'sa moss creep, orange rust breathing

across winter's bronze face. Skyis what orbits, sun what stains

the window span with its comet-tailof abandonment: ice so shattered

we swear it fire.

The History of Air, Part 2

The mimosa folds each tiny rackof green ribs as the sun

downs and the parking lot growsmore to distance, her night terrors

again coming on as her namefades from the vomit tub where I inked it as she

did mine on the plastic soap dish I carriedthree summers up the mountain to camp, to bonfires and sticky

blackened marshmallows that tasted ofdirt-clotted air—

With all my owndeath-fears, what did I

ever know? Not how she'd clutchthe call-light, the narrow snake

and wand of it, its one powder-white eyeto press, wrist watch drifting to her elbow's jut

and sail; not how words would keep wayingup the north road she,

remembering, puts her should to, herhurry to; wipe the spoon, she says, we will need

a knife and a fork and a coat, where we are going—Not how I couldn't

let her hand go even as her veinscollapse and she strains

into atmosphere, into the too-thin airalways encircling us.

Round Trip

1

Enough, these weekends' drive, to hold the distanthill approaching wild-

boar bristled with winter-shed trees and a cell towerstar-pulsed, needle-tipped one

aspirant drop of light like the onethat clears each day's syringe of air

bubbles bobbing like balloonsschooled to her wrist that birthday sixty-

five years ago, diaphanoussapphire globes her mother tied off, her own breath

jeweled inside. Lost skyof blue milk, her translucent face turned away

by Mylar's metallic get-well-soonwithering down her hospital room wall

with the raisiny deflation I never knew the lungs' alveolicould rubber to.

When the day's needle nestles a lastunshot vein, her fist

opens to a flutter of fingers, ghosts of stringsuntangling so all the bright

jostling orbs driftbeyond the retrievable, that brief air

just above the body.

2

Clouds shuffle and reshuffleover the hill that fiveminutes ago was fiveminutes away, now recedingto a later hour'shesitant dusk, all lanesof the highway blocked by a wreck's

call and response, cars oneby one turningoff their engines until only a semi'sstill snuffling, the quieted cars bracketing the onemissed beat in its engine's

flawed timing. Exhaustrivers the air, waveringlike the road ahead mis-engineered to the hill'sborn curve now a graniteapron of spillage dotted with stuntedevergreens and dwarf, bare-boned trees guerilla-Christmased with beer cans' golden cylinders and shivery

foil boas; one's greenribboned with CDS, disk afterdisk rainbowing late sun around its ownpunched-out heartas if it were the blank at the bull's-eye

of everything.

3

It matters how you tell it, the versionyou're driving: in one, the bodyrises, helicopter

lifting into afterimage spunfrom two crossed planks oaring the seaof late afternoon air, traffic

moving on, into the shimmering seasontinseling the hill's twiggedcinnamon and gauze,

its buzz-cut of wintergray as the ashtrays she wouldrinse each night, just

to be sure. Or say midnightbegins with ice; in her hospital room, it's as if we'reinside an eggshell shattering when the rain

glasses over to loop the car-crash the moment the windshieldsucked in and hailed with milky crystals blunt

as rock candy the driver who couldn'thave known what dim stars his world's sweet lightwould press down...