LITMIR.BIZ

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of story. Except that since then James

      has followed me, showing up sometimes at the house

      to read my gas meter, sometimes behind the counter

      where I ask him what I owe. No surprise then

      that I’ve made my life with another James,

      who swears my biggest defect is still the limits

      on what I’ll bring myself to do for someone else.

      I know there are people who’ll cut out their kidney

      to replace a friend’s cankered one, people

      who’ll rush into burning buildings to save the lives

      of strangers. But every time I ponder selflessness

      I hear the beats of my heart, that common loon,

      most primitive of birds. Then my life seems most

      like a naked, frail thing that must be protected,

      and I have suddenly become its mother, paddling

      with my own life saddled on my back.

      There’s one last thing I didn’t mention —

      when I refused to breathe for the dying James

      what happened next was that I began to laugh:

      a thin laugh, nervous laugh… but loud enough

      to drift outside, where it stood on the hill

      and creaked its wings a minute before lifting—

      over the levees, across those shallowest of waters.

Needles

      So first there’s the chemo: three sticks, once a week,

      twenty-six weeks.

      Then you add interferon: one stick, three times a week,

      forever.

      And then there’s the blood tests. How many blood tests?

      (Too many to count.)

      Add all the sticks up and they come down to this: either

      your coming out clean

      or else… well, nobody’s talking

      about the B-side,

      an or else that plows through your life like a combine

      driven at stock-car speed,

      shucking the past into two piles: things that mattered

      and things that didn’t.

      And the first pile looks so small when you think of

      everything you haven’t done —

      never seeing the Serengeti or Graceland, never running

      with the bulls in Spain.

      Not to mention all the women you haven’t done yet!—

      and double that number of breasts.

      Okay—

      you’ve got a woman, a good woman, make no mistake.

      But how come you get just one woman when you’re getting

      many lifetimes’ worth of sticks?

      Where is the justice in that? You feel like someone

      who’s run out of clean clothes

      with laundry day still half a week away; all those women

      you tossed in the pile

      marked things that didn’t matter, now you can’t help but

      drag them out.

      Like the blond on trail crew who lugged the chain saw

      on her shoulder up a mountain

      and bucked up chunks of blighted trees — how could you

      have forgotten

      how her arms quaked when the saw whined and the muscles

      went liquid in her quads,

      or the sweaty patch on her chest where a mosaic formed

      of shiny flies and moss?

      Or that swarthy-haired dancer, her underpants hooked

      across her face like the Lone Ranger,

      the one your friends paid to come to the table, where

      she pawed and made you blush:

       How come yer getting married when you could be muff-diving

       every night?

      At college they swore it was John Dewey, they swore

      by the quadruped Rousseau,

      and it took cancer to step up and punch your gut

      before you figured

      that all along immortal truth’s one best embodiment

      was just

      some sixteen-year-old table-dancing on a forged ID

      at Ponders Corners.

      You should have bought a red sports car, skimmed it under

      the descending arms at the railroad crossing,

      the blond and brunette beside you under its moonroof

      and everything smelling of leather —

      yes yes—this has been your flaw: how you have always

      turned away from the moment

      your life was about to be stripped so the bone of it

      lies bare and glittering.

      You even tried wearing a White Sox cap to bed but its bill

      nearly put your wife’s eye out.

      So now you’re left no choice but going capless, scarred;

      you must stand erect;

      you must unveil yourself as a bald man in that most

      treacherous darkness.

      You remember the first night your parents left town, left

      you home without a sitter.

      Two friends came over and one of them drove the Mercury

      your dad had parked stalwartly

      in the drive (you didn’t know how yet) — took it down

      to some skinny junkie’s place

      in Wicker Park, cousin of a friend of a cousin, friend

      of a cousin of a friend,

      what did it matter but that his name was Sczabo.

      Sczabo! —

      as though this guy were a skin disease, or a magician

      about to make doves appear.

      What he did was tie off your friends with a surgical tube,

      piece of lurid chitterling

      smudged with grease along its length. Then needle, spoon —

      he did the whole bit,

      it was just like in the movies, only your turn turned you

      chicken (or were you defiant? — )

      Somebody’s got to drive home, and that’s what you did

      though you’d never

      made it even as far as the driveway’s end before

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