Irises

White Tiger. Bohemian Waxwing.

Night-blooming Cereus.

Even water, with its gift for shape-shifting

seemed like a metaphor

for some strange being I might become.

Blood work boring, CT scan unremarkable,

my oncologist tells me,

his voice cheerful over the phone

and I think of the airport—

remember the couple that streamed past

as I struggled slowly forward.

Their wheeled luggage trailed behind them

sleek and exotic.

But only for a moment.

On the back steps, the irises

my daughter picked up on clearance

slump over their cartons.

Their petals emit a papery, uncertain glow

like forgotten ghosts

lit at last by the Northern sun.

**

I wrote this poem after I'd finished chemotherapy at Dana Farber Cancer Institute. I was initially misdiagnosed with a different type of cancer, high-grade stage 3 neuroendocrine cancer, but DF did a bunch of crazy tests and figured out I had another kind of cancer, one which required a different treatment with a completely different set of drugs. 

I was hooked up to the Chemo machine for my first session, in the comfy chair, when my oncologist called and told the nurse, "Stop the chemo." I had just taken all seven anti-nausea pills. 

I credit Dana Farber, along with the surgeon who performed two back-to-back emergency surgeries on me, with saving my life. The comments about my bloodwork and CT scan were my brilliant oncologist's actual words to me during the pandemic, when we had a phone meeting.

The poem suggests what seems obvious but for some reason is a feeling I find difficult to convey - the change in perspective an experience like a life-threatening illness brings. I'm in remission now (clinically it's call NDED -lol) but I'm still not out of the 5-year period everybody wants to reach. 

One thing I like about poetry is that it distills what's chaotic and confusing into something like clarity - Frost's "momentary stay against confusion." I've never written anything about my illness in prose because such an experience is remarkably resistant to the kind of clarity you find in nonfiction. At least that's how it's been for me. 

I have also lived in New England most of my life and, to quote my favorite poet Emily Dickinson, "I see--New Englandly."

Thanks for reading.