My Wobbly Bicycle, 2

I’m gathering information, deciding between joining a clinical trial group or not (decided not), getting a CAT scan, looking online at wigs and caps, preparing for my 3-4 month blast of chemo and radiation, the vicious murder of all fast-growing cells in my body. In battle-mode, people say. She’s “fought” her cancer. After a long “battle” with cancer, he succumbed. I’m interested in the language. How fiercely we want to survive. Of course we do. I do. The cancer is in my lymph nodes. Not what we'd wanted to hear.I love it that my friends want to pull their light-swords and fight the universe for me. I am in complete sympathy with Thomas Hardy’s wish for a vengeful God to shake a fist at, rather than the “purblind Doomsters” who “had as readily strown / Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.”I think, though, of the effect of battle-language. As we now know, nothing gets thrown “away.” There is no “away” to throw things to. No enemy gets “destroyed.” There’s always an opposite force mounting itself in response. What gets pushed away springs back like a rubber-band. So, what language for this cancer I have? This is what I’ve come up with:You can pave over the grass, but if there’s the tiniest crack anywhere, a pale little blade will soon emerge. Life is determined to live. Life, of course, is not just the growing and developing part. The sprig that emerges is going to die when it’s finished with the other, as part of the wholeness of things. It could be that I’m finished with the other. It feels as if I’m not. There’s a great deal of life going on in me. I have a lot of work I want to do. Quoting the sage, Elvis, “a lotta, lotta livin’ to do.”  My stand-up paddleboard is waiting for me next summer. My children and grandchildren are waiting for all of us to be together at the lake again.So, as I head into chemo, my intention is to stay curious, to look for the route life is taking at the moment. Since, I’m not separate from anything, this amounts to the route life is taking in everything, in every direction. Where is it now? It’s in this keyboard, in the poem I want to get back to, in my  awareness of dearest husband downstairs answering emails, in the tick of my clock, in the warmth of my green tea. A LOT of green tea! Have you seen the statistics on how much good it does?“Route”? Another maybe misleading word. Everywhere is the route, but as each second opens itself, there’s the next coming on, and life works itself out: trunk, branches, leaves.I don’t know how to say any of this. The truth always eludes me, as soon as I think I’ve found a clever phrase to pin it down. I don’t know why I bother. But it does seem that humans keep bothering.The bothering often seems more successful in poetry than in prose. Poems know how to point toward rather than to try to articulate the truth. Poems are written—the good ones—by people who stumble in the dark, feeling their way. I’m stumbling, or as I put it last week, riding a wobbly bicycle.But I’m okay with wobbliness. Wobbliness focuses one amazingly, to stay upright. I’m sure the bicycle wants to stay upright, since it is so much fun to ride. I’m going to go with that.