Breast Cancer

He was a man of startlingly few words.

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(She’d known that when she married him.)

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Somehow life passes. A dream. A cloud.

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Or at least she reached the point

Where she couldn’t hear them wailing

Anymore, and didn’t recognize

How craven was her wanting.

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Somehow life passes. A dream. A cloud.

Or these days, like the images on Instagram

Flaring up, then disappearing to become

Irretrievable forever.

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You wake up, or walk out of the cloud’s fog

And find yourself seat belted in a vehicle

Beside a man who last told you how he felt

Three decades past in the stilted words

Of the marriage pact he obediently repeated

To please his family and friends.

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Long ago, she stopped wondering

Who he had become, or how he felt.

Steadiness was what he offered—

Not a soundtrack of the process.

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It’s true,she admitted to her therapist.

He never promised more.

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Use your words, she used to tell the children,

Chucking them under the chin with two fingers

And lifting their heads so their eyes met hers,

Teaching them to talk by speaking to them

In the foreign language of love.

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He drove the pickup to fetch her.

And if she hadn’t been so woozy

In the long jet stream of OxyContin’s

Afterlife, she might have wondered why. . . .

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For weeks now, she’s been shooing her mind

Away from certain memories—the children’s

Noisy sucking at her breasts, the sharp needles

Racing through her chest when the milk surged in.

How it felt to bend over after a bath, heavy

Handfuls of warm breasts, spilling down to fill

The convex cups of a lacy bra. The modest curve

Of cleavage nature had endowed her with.

In the hospital, the nursing staff

Kept urging her to look

Beneath the bandages

And change the dressings

By herself.

But she could not.

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Before the surgery, he shook the hand

Of the oncologist, and looked down

At her, laid out on the gurney.

And though he didn’t say a word,

She knew he’d be there when she woke.

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When they’d bought the property on the side

Of the hill, she hadn’t wanted that much

Privacy or distance. But over time, she made

Herself adjust, and now she’s at peace

With the silence of the woods, and how it echoes

Mutely the wordless years between them.

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At first she thinks it’s trash—the scrawling line

Of white markers, marring the grassy margin

That separates the gravel road from where

The piney woods begin their hillside creep,

And wonders how they got there or why

There are so many lined up like soldiers in the dark,

And how they remind her of the cardboard sheets

The cleaner folds inside his business shirts. . . .

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He must have planned it, and written them

Out by hand, inking each one of the three words

In broad, black marker on the smooth white face

Of cardboard rescued from recycling.

And then he would have staked each sign

To a wooden shim, and hiked up the hill,

And shoved them deep in the ground, ordering

Those three words into one repeating sentence

She would read over and over, winding slowly

Uphill, strapped beside him in the truck’s dark cab

As he drove her home after the surgery

So there would be no need to speak, and he could

Go on as before without breaking his silence.