It is all present or it is nothing.

These days I think so often about Jack—his sermons, jokes, and chatter; his long work with students and church; his slow breathing and his cold hand.

This book ends otherwise than it started. Today as I conclude a draft, it is only three months since I began. During these three months I have worked more hours on poems than I have worked on this little book: I have finished a book review and two or three short essays; I have dictated hundreds of letters; I have acquired two more grandchildren; I have helped my mother back from another heart-attack; I have lost two-thirds of a liver and nine-tenths of my complacency. I have come so close to Jane that I feel as if I had crawled into her body through her pores—and, although the occasion of this penetration has been melancholy, the comfort is luminous and redemptive. Every day she rubs my body, trunk and limbs; her hands knead my back, lift my head, pull my hair—and I feel, intensely, an interdependent fusing together of our bodies and spirits. When she lays hands on my abdomen, pausing, I know that she is praying or meditating the cancer out.

Chemotherapy begins tomorrow. When Jack Jensen started chemotherapy, I decided to shave my head to be bald with Jack; then he spoiled my putative gesture by wearing a wig. Will I follow Jack from chemo to the memorial bench, where we prayed for him the day this book started? So often chemo means that an operation is impossible, and suggests imminent death; in my case I know it indicates no great carcinoma growing in me now—because my CEA has dropped to normal—but I understand the statistical probability that I carry a residue of malign cells: I will infuse 5FU’s poison into my veins to kill cells, knowing that no one can tell me that this procedure is effective, only that it might be … Appetite and energy will diminish, replaced by nausea and diarrhea. What shall I do? Lethargy is hardly something to do. There are children’s books I want to write; there are six long poems or sequences to work on. “The Daughters of Edward D. Boit” I can redraft three times a week; a long poem that I began fifteen years ago is two-thirds solid and intact; do I need to rewrite the other third or merely cut it out, like the lobe of a liver? The other long things are mostly done, subject to tinkering-revision, clean copy every week or two; but working them over will distract me for a long time. If I have a long time.

If little poems announce themselves I will open the door; they knock infrequently these days. But I will undertake no more long projects. I will do short stories, children’s books, new short poems, maybe another essay of this length, certainly essays of a thousand words for periodicals—but no more long-term projects. Today if I begin a thought about 1995 I do not finish the thought. It is easier, and it remains pleasant, to undertake short endeavors which absorb me as much as any work can. There is only one long-term project.