Demobilized

I am a demobilized armada
A vast array of war machines
Languishing in dock and depot
Missiles and tanks, medicines and masks
Beautiful when turned to ugly purpose
Pathetic when relegated to rust or recall

How noble the soldier appears
Carrying his sword into terror and torment
Kill or be killed somehow a moral maxim
Each uttered word filled with urgent portent
The reality of ready mortality
Giving purpose to the life-driven life

The decommissioned warrior like an astronaut
Returning to an Earth impossibly unchanged
Not merely life goes on but death and disappointment
For all the talk of insight and transcendence
The war was waged not for a new road
But for the road on which we travel still

Thermals

The seahawk alights just past 10

Feeling the thermals pull him aloft

Oblivious to my longing stare

Through the reflective glass

Of the isolation room

Each day the same circle

The seeming monotony

Of the search for prey

Not a calorie to be wasted

Or a wing idly flapped

I lie on the bed again

As I did the other days

And go into a waking dream

I circle the river with him

Finding the new in the same

Three weeks later

I spy a hawk as I hike

Twenty-two miles upriver

Thermal circle of searching

For the same in the new

Sailing

A flotilla of sailfish congregate
In the rainy silence of the upper basin
Each experiment with healing in 5 mph wind
As if genuflecting to the black water
Acknowledging the meaning of ripples

The determined dance with defeat
The tourists in their duckboats
Straining to see through the fog
The jogger in yellow slicks
Imagining yesterday's marathon

From my aerie vantage
I can spy 20 years of missteps
The reaching and rejection
The naivete and narcissism
The guilt of the living

That I can still bear to look
Is the paradox of survival
To live with mortality named
To know where defeat lurks
And go sailing in the rain

Ellison

Fourteen stories up
In a building I imagine
Is named for Ralph Ellison
I look down on playing fields
Invisible to the teams
Soccer and Little League
That I pretend to scout.

My room has reflective glass
Inscrutable, impenetrable
Like a Trooper's shades
A million dollar view
Of a river that offered black silence
In response to my snowshoe inquires
Now sparkling, swollen with melt.

I can see the lives move by
On fields and bike paths
As I so often did myself
Wondering who is more real
Knowing that reality is ecumenical
As is the river dark in Dover
Now alighted and alive below me.

Seeds

Like Persephone before me
The bloody seeds of a pomegranate
Or something akin
Were my very undoing
Slipping from my marrow
Tricking me into accepting them
As Hades tricked her

A long winter was the price
Decreed by the Fates
For taking in the seeds
My skin a barren, hairless desert
Earth and life frozen
In suspended animation
As Clotho spun my thread

The seeds will bring me back
Heeding Zeus' command
To undo Hades' deception
Planted in an empty field
They will find life
Defying Lachesis and Atropos
Bearing fruit from blood.

Gates

After two days of limited movement
Bed-toilet-chair-bed
Mentally pacing a generous cell
I am disconnected from all tubes
And step onto the elevator
Pressing 1 nonchalantly
As if I did this regularly
As if anything were regular

I blink reflexively at the sun
Shining against unfamiliar snow
Offended at the world
For spinning on without me
But feel little else
Not my tongue
Not the sting
Not the release

One more gate passed through
Another token collected
Gaining entrance to another room
Another test to be tested
Data clinging to me
But little else
Save the sensation that lasts
More gates await

Incongruity

The chemo floor is laid out
In patterns meant to assure
Blue white blue blue white
Squares of a checkerboard

In this box of a building
They put lines into me
Running down straight poles
From rectangular bags

Into how many squares
Have I entered with hope
Watching white coats
Ponder slides and charts

All this to battle a world
Of the round and oblong
Spherical planets and tumors
Evading angular control

Émigré

The year breaks against the dilapidated jetty
Not so much new as alien and indecipherable
The saccharine certainties of Auld Lang Syne
A useless tool for navigating this strange planet
Obscured by snow, recession, and disease

In a matter of weeks we can look forward
To the soaring oratory of hope
The audacity found in looking skyward
Rather than to the ravaged landscape
Into which we expect to plant seeds

Is it anxiety or bravery that fixes our eyes
Steadily on the grim metrics of the now
The relentless chop of expectations dashed
Of assumptions held like a mogul's privileges
Of savings accounts and red blood cell counts

We exhale from the collective delusion
That sustained us through the false years
Of presumed safety and accomplishment
Nothing for it but to endure as an émigré
Learning the new language as we go.

Stranger

One wonders how many journeys
Ostensibly of self-discovery and definition
Are intended as such by the searcher
Setting out to become more than he is

Odysseus went to Troy for glory and honor
Then merely wished to return home
To the comforts of Penelope and court
Never the tests of sirens and Scylla

What, ultimately, is discovered
Is no truth he can recognize
But the stranger living within
Unbidden and rarely welcome

The voyage of acceptance
Of what the razor can reveal
Of what the eyes can take in
Of what the heart can sustain.

Early

The holiday comes early If it comes at all
Seen vaguely through a fog
Of Benedryl and ocean-borne snow
The rituals carried out
To keep the old normal in sight
As a new normal covers the world

Symptoms of the new present themselves
Falling snow, falling hair
White on black, stark and definite
The tide beaten back
By the engines of modernity
IV lines and snowblowers

The tree erected haphazardly
The gifts exchanged quickly
A holiday observed self-consciously
Moments of illusory clarity
As lights blink steadily
Vital signs of what we've become

Release

At 4:15 p.m. on a cloudy Sunday
I sign the lengthy release forms
Skimming through the paragraphs
Finding the parental line
That says I trust them
These well-meaning, well-pierced
Twentysomethings with their abs
And their way about a rock wall

As reluctant holiday shoppers
Move by with aimless purpose
We sidle up to the plastic tower
With its contrived footholds
As real as anything pulsing
Through my veins and glands
As certain to find the mark
As we are to grab the rope

I help my youngest son
Into the harness and climbing shoes
All to release me from worry
To reassure him that nothing
No harm will come to him
That all risked is reward
That fathers and precious sons
And would-be heroes never fall

With 11-year-old nonchalance
And a side glance for reassurance
He pulls on the rope with his all
Planting feet on the first holds
Hearing the spotter urge him on
Straighten the leg...reach
Take a breath and think
Hear your own voice

Two stories up and two thirds there
He can go no further
The next hand grip beyond him
The left knee bent and locked
He asks if he can come down
What do you think?
Another breath, another pause
The left leg straightens

He slaps the top of the pulley
And begins his triumphant slide
A moment to carry us home
Out of the REI store
Down the Pike and 128
Oblivious to snowflakes
And the tailights of the aimless
We see our exit and take it

Turgid

Outside the oncologist's window
Eighty feet below my new world
The Charles transforms itself
From a meandering country stream
To a turbid flurry of foam
Sheer rock walls and a tumescent island
Channel the water down the Lower Falls
A small relic of the Industrial era

Cars pass by on Rt. 16 like flies
Passengers oblivious to the turmoil
Staring ahead and rushing
To Starbucks and beyond
The old falls yesterday's news
The building above it
An anonymous box of nothing
But for the turgid cells inside

Risk

Bravado, like innocence
Bleeds into the blue sunlight
Winking like a harlot
Calling like a siren

The time of posing
Assuming a will of iron
A Lance-like determination
Is exposed for what it is

The intruder is sentient
With its own brilliant design
Co-opting gene, cell and marrow
To its truly iron will

The host has been awakened
The interloper revealed
In lumps, scans, and slides
For the quiet, genius of its plan

It speaks to me now
In even, measured tones
Of mutually assured destruction
Of its own inevitable death

As my counterattack forms its lines
Each cut goes deeper than the last
Biopsy, marrow sample, mediport
Pain a direct line of communication

There is no victimless war
No surgical bombing campaign
The casualties will surely mount
And all my treasures will be at risk

Vantage

Sitting in the corner room
Of the Inn at Castle Hill
Where we celebrated liberty
Over lobster hash and jazz
Where we celebrated marriage
Over asthma and divided children

I can look straight ahead
Out the west-facing window
And watch the sun set
In rose-colored harmony
With the azure sky
And the steady channel waters

I can turn to my left
Feeling the lump on my clavicle
And look to the southwest
At the black clouds of evening
Swallowing the bruised sun
Into a wine dark sea

Vantage is everything
We can marvel at the rose
We can grieve the bruise
We can live with both truths
Of what is changed and lost
Of what is possibility and gift

Threshold

There are moments in our lives
Of contrived or manufactured transition
The wedding, the prom, the New Year's party
When things might change forever
Or they might offer more of the same

As I walk down my office stairs
Down to the streets of Brockton
I know I will never return here
The same man in mind or body
That part of me will go no matter

I am already a member
Of a new class of people
Even before I take on
The familiar talismans of disease
Yellow wristbands and shaven heads

Billboards and radio spots cry out
The siren calls of my new brethren
The survivors and the fallen and the families
Like proud, fellow owners
Of a new car I just bought

What I can save of myself
And what is worth saving
What will return to this building
And what must fade away
Is the essence of the battle

Leaf

The perfect cup of coffee
The kind with the leaf
Etched implausibly in the foam
Sits drained at my table
And I almost grieve its passing

Leaving the tiny Cambridge cafe
I pause at the door too long
Protecting this indulgent interlude
As I do each solitary drop
Of fading normalcy

But it's all interlude already
And it's all indulgence
The notion that any moment
Can be seized and held
Is both illusory and arrogant

I follow the highway south
Familiar landmarks sail away
And strange rooms come into view
In buildings that replace the known
With conjectures of destiny

The labyrinth of hospital wings
Navigated confidently
With subconscious efficiency
PET scan films collected
An exit with speed and stealth

Bifurcation and ambivalence
Are the rule of the day
Holding back the passage of time
In one moment
Only to will it on faster in the next

Patron

I was born on the Feast day
Of my namesake
Another reluctant hero
Whose name meant crown
Stephanos said the Greeks

I imagine his reluctance
In the way he wore his crown
Cross askew and awkward
Eyes set in sadness and disbelief
At the barbarism of his people

Yet there he stood firmly
At the gates of Vienna
At the dawn of the second Millenium
And defiantly told the Ottomans
You shall not pass

Even the pagan Magyars
His flesh and blood
Who resisted conversion
Were worthy of his protection
And ultimately, mercy

Who is to say of what I'm made
Merely by dint of a name
A birth date, not a birthright
Yet here I stand at my own gates
Worthy in my defiance.

Mantle

A new use of an old and trusted word
That conjures images of fireplaces
Of winter nights and marshmallows
Of picture frames and garlands
Dinner parties and solitude

Or a part of the Earth
That seems imaginary but isn't
The protective layer
Between crust and core
Keeping us from melting

Or perhaps it should be
A garment of power
Worn by feudal lords
Cardinals, popes, and knights
With entitlement or reluctance

Now a cell among many
Fueled by rogue genetics
Assuming the purple mantle of power
Between my crust and my core
With entitlement, not reluctance.

Dreadnought

Dreadnought
Conjures images of battleships
With HMS and carved figureheads
Pendants and signals flapping gallantly
As she cuts a steady path
Through the chop of some foreign sea

Fear nothing
Is what it means
In that uniquely British way
Of dressing up something difficult
To sound noble and innate
Like stiff upper lips

Dread mortality
Is what my mind tells me
Through the pit in my stomach
And the look in her eyes
The squeeze of my doctor’s hand
As he bid me good luck

Fear ignorance
Is what I must live by
Not fear of what I know
That all things pass
Even and especially me
Except what we give to others.