Login
|
Join PoetrySoup
Home
Submit Poems
Login
Sign Up
Member Home
My Poems
My Quotes
My Profile & Settings
My Inboxes
My Outboxes
Soup Mail
Contest Results/Status
Contests
Poems
Poets
Famous Poems
Famous Poets
Dictionary
Types of Poems
Quotes
Short Stories
Articles
Forum
Blogs
Poem of the Day
New Poems
Resources
Syllable Counter
Anthology
Grammar Check
Greeting Card Maker
Classifieds
Member Area
Member Home
My Profile and Settings
My Poems
My Quotes
My Short Stories
My Articles
My Comments Inboxes
My Comments Outboxes
Soup Mail
Poetry Contests
Contest Results/Status
Followers
Poems of Poets I Follow
Friend Builder
Soup Social
Poetry Forum
New/Upcoming Features
The Wall
Soup Facebook Page
Who is Online
Link to Us
Member Poems
Poems - Top 100 New
Poems - Top 100 All-Time
Poems - Best
Poems - by Topic
Poems - New (All)
Poems - New (PM)
Poems - New by Poet
Poems - Random
Poems - Read
Poems - Unread
Member Poets
Poets - Best New
Poets - New
Poets - Top 100 Most Poems
Poets - Top 100 Most Poems Recent
Poets - Top 100 Community
Poets - Top 100 Contest
Famous Poems
Famous Poems - African American
Famous Poems - Best
Famous Poems - Classical
Famous Poems - English
Famous Poems - Haiku
Famous Poems - Love
Famous Poems - Short
Famous Poems - Top 100
Famous Poets
Famous Poets - Living
Famous Poets - Most Popular
Famous Poets - Top 100
Famous Poets - Best
Famous Poets - Women
Famous Poets - African American
Famous Poets - Beat
Famous Poets - Cinquain
Famous Poets - Classical
Famous Poets - English
Famous Poets - Haiku
Famous Poets - Hindi
Famous Poets - Jewish
Famous Poets - Love
Famous Poets - Metaphysical
Famous Poets - Modern
Famous Poets - Punjabi
Famous Poets - Romantic
Famous Poets - Spanish
Famous Poets - Suicidal
Famous Poets - Urdu
Famous Poets - War
Poetry Resources
Anagrams
Bible
Book Store
Character Counter
Cliché Finder
Poetry Clichés
Common Words
Copyright Information
Grammar
Grammar Checker
Homonym
Homophones
How to Write a Poem
Lyrics
Love Poem Generator
New Poetic Forms
Plagiarism Checker
Poetics
Poetry Art
Publishing
Random Word Generator
Spell Checker
Store
What is Good Poetry?
Word Counter
Email Poem
Your IP Address: 3.144.160.219
From Email:
Required
Email Address Not Valid.
To Email:
Email Address Not Valid.
Required
Subject
Required
Personal Note:
Poem Title:
Poem
"First, do no harm," the Hippocratic Oath begins, but before she might enjoy such balm, the docs had to harm her tumor. It was large, rare, and so anomalous in its behavior that at first they mis- diagnosed it. "Your wife will die of it within a year." But in ten days or so I sat beside her bed with hot-and-sour soup and heard an intern congratulate her on her new diagnosis: a children's cancer (doesn't that possessive break your heart?) had possessed her. I couldn't stop personifying it. Devious, dour, it had a clouded heart, like Iago's. It loved disguise. It was a garrison in a captured city, a bad horror film (The Blob), a stowaway, an inside job. If I could make it be like something else, I wouldn't have to think of it as what, in fact, it was: part of my lovely wife. Next, then, chemotherapy. Her hair fell out in tufts, her color dulled, she sat laced to bags of poison she endured somewhat better than her cancer cells could, though not by much. And indeed, the cancer cells waned more slowly than the chemical "cocktails" (one the bright color of Campari), as the chemo nurses called them, dripped into her. There were three hundred days of this: a week inside the hospital and two weeks out, the fierce elixirs percolating all the while. She did five weeks of radiation, too, Monday to Friday like a stupid job. She wouldn't eat the food the hospital wheeled in. "Pureed fish" and "minced fish" were worth, I thought, a sharp surge of food snobbery, but she'd grown averse to it all -- the nurses' crepe soles' muffled squeaks along the hall, the filtered air, the smothered urge to read, the fear, the perky visitors, flowers she'd not been sent when she was well, the room- mate (what do "semiprivate" and "extra virgin" have in common?) who died, the nights she wept and sweated faster than the tubes could moisten her with lurid poison. One chemotherapy veteran, six years in remission, chanced on her former chemo nurse at a bus stop and threw up. My wife's tumor has not come back. I like to think of it in Tumor Hell strapped to a dray, flat as a deflated football, bleak and nubbled like a poorly ironed truffle. There's one tense in Tumor Hell: forever, or what we call the present. For that long the flaccid tumor marinates in lurid toxins. Tumor Hell Clinic is, it turns out, a teaching hospital. Every century or so, the way we'd measure it, a chief doc brings a pack of students round. They run some simple tests: surge current through the tumor, batter it with mallets, push a wood-plane across its pebbled hide and watch a scurf of tumor- pelt kink loose from it, impale it, strafe it with lye and napalm. There might be nothing left in there but a still space surrounded by a carapace. "This one is nearly dead," the chief doc says. "What's the cure for that?" The students know: "Kill it slower, of course." They sprinkle it with rock salt and move on. Here on the aging earth the tumor's gone: My wife is hale, though wary, and why not? Once you've had cancer, you don't get headaches anymore, you get brain tumors, at least until the aspirin kicks in. Her hair's back, her weight, her appetite. "And what about you?" friends ask me. First the fear felt like sudden weightlessness: I couldn't steer and couldn't stay. I couldn't concentrate: surely my spit would dry before I could slather a stamp. I made a list of things to do next day before I went to bed, slept like a cork, woke to no more memory of last night's list than smoke has of fire, made a new list, began to do the things on it, wept, paced, berated myself, drove to the hospital, and brought my wife food from the takeout joints that ring a hospital as surely as brothels surround a gold strike. I drove home rancid with anger at her luck and mine -- anger that filled me the same way nature hates a vacuum. "This must be hell for you," some said. Hell's not other people: Sartre was wrong about that, too. L'enfer, c'est moi? I've not got the ego for it. There'd be no hell if Dante hadn't built a model of his rage so well, and he contrived to get exiled from it, for it was Florence. Why would I live in hell? I love New York. Some even said the tumor and fierce cure were harder on the care giver -- yes, they said "care giver" -- than on the "sick person." They were wrong who said those things. Of course I hated it, but some of "it" was me -- the self-pity I allowed myself, the brave poses I struck. The rest was dire threat my wife met with moral stubbornness, terror, rude jokes, nausea, you name it. No, let her think of its name and never say it, as if it were the name of God.
Type the characters you see in the picture
Required