No power. And still we pray, more like John Donne today, with more demand and fury than humility and repose—God, why the shadblow?! This never would have happened except the leaves were still turning, holding on for a week or two. They held firm and kept the snow. They wouldn’t let go and down they came. The early storm caught them turning. Had they let go, like every other winter, the bare essential stalks would have slipped the wind. What costly lessons of the age.

How do I become lean and leafless in the midst of surgeons and oncologists? How do I let my illness go like a leaf from my body before the storm? I must let go, the last leap of faith, must give myself over, must not be caught turning brilliant, must not go down with the storm. I must not cling to old inner leaves, old fears, old dreams. I must not break like autumn trees. A brilliant break is still a break.

So, in a world were men go long hard years to school to become cosmetic surgeons, surgeons of appearance, in a world where people pay them to rearrange their features so they can never face who they are; in such a world, my last moat before wholeness is to give up all appearance, no matter how thin what remains.

My last leap is in that river of light that is God’s and mine, in that purity of life-force that makes these sore hips dance till the dance relieves the soreness, in that purity of being that makes my sore head swim through the sea of uncertainty till what’s outlived us all begins to ease my frightened mind.

The day the trees fell. We’re out trudging in the midst of sixty-degree sunshine, brilliant accent on the wreckage: orange maples split at the trunk, long slim elms reaching for the sky snapped in frozen gesture, and stubborn oaks wishboned and standing. The day the trees fell. As I await word about another biopsy, Ann refuses to let us be driven from our home. Home, she says, is greater than the storm. She boils soup on the Kerosun and puts candles by our heads. And as she rocks my fearful being in her arms, I begin to strip the excess that remains.

Post-Op

POST-OP

I could see it in your eye

when you thought I was dozing.

You thought you might lose me

and you started to remove yourself

as we do when pets are about to die

or old friends have decided to move.

But we are living with this,

not dying from it, and I

am not going, not until

the red bird flies

into the sun.

And you must not

corrupt the time we have

by double-living

what we will not.

So come on back.

Tell me your pain.

Utter your fear.

I feel it anyway.

This I’ve learned, the pain

makes the secrets known.