Sara Greenslit
The Subtler Sense, This is Just Part
All winter, all spring, then summer, fall, then winter again, an upright piano’s sat on the open porch, its back facing east, a solidity ever-present, as one passes, songless—
The first sandhill cranes of the spring overhead, overcast, unseen dinosaurs
The first nightmares after re-dreaming began.
The juncos return on their way back to Canada, white beaks stark against dark grey heads, as if, while searching for seeds on the ground, a cream safflower seed attached to each of their faces.
While talking to the dogs, I realize most words are unnecessary.
The relief at the absence of lake ice, and the return of the loons
My patience is a ragged scrap of flannel.
Car stereo on the street, contrapuntal to my own pulse, an over- assertion of beat upon beat, machine over man—I hold my breath to see if my heart’s stilled.
And: the parallel evolution of bat nose and bird beak with flower, with the mystery of the plants’ return each spring after winter dormancy, to an opening flower following the sun.
A fine mist, buds on the trees, a hinting of new green, that exuberant verdancy of almost, imminent, birds in every layer of air
How, during chemo, wherever I went there was always someone coughing
What unfolding, what unraveling
The source, the flare, the drive, keepatitkeepingatit—catch your breath, catch your step, a hitch in your hike, an aside in your step.
The year anniversary of all-that-soon-became-apparent, overlap- ping with Now, my refusal to name exact dates, except 7.20, surgery
The scrim of distance inherent in/on everything
Living your life in half-hour increments
Across the street a man dances alone in his driveway
A man walks down the sidewalk, his cat following, bounding in and out of driveways.
The bindweed, the barking dogs, the base thrum of a car stereo, the sirens, the sighs, the striations of stress and thrum—indoors, it is almost quiet.
The irritation of constant aural bombardment in town—wishing for an exhale of peace. Sometimes, briefly, in the late morning, there is a downturn of volume, an absence filled with underlying birdsong and wing.
Rain, then an outburst of green upward. The leaves of trees soft as the damp bellies of toads.
A current, an undertow of sadness, sourceless, but then paused on its edge, it’s a Dr. Day, a checkup, post. Friends write of their friends’ deaths, metastases, or new disease—and it comes down to this. Trying to pushbackpushbackpushback, but the thing insists, persists. Thinking backward, opening that cupboard of many days, but I just can’t. That’s enough.
Almost catch myself almost forgetting
An inclination to shut my mouth, to stop complaining. Outside, songbirds, I’ve forgotten their rusted names—
A predilection towards sleep, a removal of want(ing)
The comfort in a blank page. The urge to go to the thrift store, buy books, and cut text out, layers of words seen through new windows.
How I cannot remember the names of the foramen (foramina?) of the pelvis. How I stood at the surgery table, a long moment, Where do I cut the cat? for a spay? Half-way or one-third between the pubis and xiphoid, or is that the dog? (3 months since chemo.) Then habit proceeds. Forward.
Misheard, miswritten, mis-seen. Brain coping with. Post-chemo, tamoxifen-onward: composure/composer, leash mania/leishmaniasis, mews/amuse/a muse, clod/Claude/clawed, lyse/lice, oncotist/oncologist
An inability to make long-term plans. Sleeping with the light on. Watching my hand move the pencil across the page.
The foramen = obturator.
The drab and redundant city birds—house finches, Canada geese, purple finches—but listen closer: chipping sparrow, cardinals, sharp-shinned hawk, kingfisher, nuthatch, pileated woodpecker, chickadee, goldfinch, yellow warbler.
Every day, another plant revives, flush in spring, as if new, my heart aflush as well, and I am glad they are there, that they have returned, like a green comfort each time I walk past.
The grackles try and fail after a few tries to get into the balanced bird feeder. Then later, one bird figures it out—if another lands and balances on the back leveling bar, like a teeter totter, the trough opens.
Just not. Just. Not.
Given into, giving. Fall, falter, fail, fret. One two, one two. A day of looking forward to, then a day of viscous hours. A dirt scrabble day, a lost entrance ticket. Hair grows back, jaw still taut. Turn the key for the engine, go around the block. Cells dividing, especially during sleep. DNA unwinding, duplicating, re-winding. A nick, an error. A correction, an oversight. The same story: again and again. The optimism of babies everywhere, bald heads bobbing from strollers, from swaddling.
The metaphors inherent in apoptosis
One could randomly flip open Rilke’s Selected, use it like the I Ching, for direction.
I catch my reflection in the window, short wavy hair, carrying a small dog—and I am transmuted into my mother—our combined fatigue, and a flashback of 30 years to her at 40, her birthday sadness palpable, all of us at a loss what to do, no one uttering a word about her despair.
The neighborhood soundtrack of leaf blower, sparrows, sirens, stereos
A book in the mail from a friend, an unfurling alphabet, a credenza of definitions, hand printed
In the absence of word, is there image? (as in: in the absence of sound, there is light?)
How when you fall asleep, you remember the beds you’ve slept in, childhood bedrooms, the slant of light, the wallpaper, must in the carpet, the rooms of adulthood—all on the edge of the edge—
The time between days or between blinking (open—close—open)— they are no different—
A stiff neck, a toe ache, a cracked lip, a hangnail—either/or, whether/wither
One just grows accustomed
No longer mostly (or solely) in the territory of Otherness, but shifting into a flatness, a plane/plain of fill in the blank
_________________, empty, not whistle, not a word, more the shade and texture of gravel, of a bitter vine, the puckering edges around a wound. A wind.
A robin singing all day, above, into a patch of woods, and then suddenly, it stops—
Laughing rats and singing mice, spark the heart
Medicine as a series of imperatives: Lie down. Turn over. Breathe in, exhale. Take this Rx. Call if X. Come back in Y.
The cascade call of a wren could be the tiniest of whinnies.
My current lexicon has its own mind: misspellings, deleted words, wrong words, whose words? (the pause: whose? who’s?)
meditation/mediation, ascites/a site, ease, vertical/vertebrate, converse/conserve, depiction/deception, never/nerve
Elderberry, sumac, gooseberry, currant, rosehip, tomato, oregano, chive, wild ginger, thyme, rosemary, fiddlehead fern, nettle, violet: what we could eat out the back door.
At least once a day I think, What am I doing?
I like the line of trees, says a friend looking at our backyard. I do too, I say, quietly.
Fatigue into absence. The space between paragraphs, sentences that trail off, a ragged scrim
A neighbor’s soprano and vibrato
A script of song to the unseen (tumors before a mammogram, aquifers below, mice in the walls, spider webs in the garden)
Pleonasm and neoplasm: the former does not make the latter more tolerable.
The bitterness tasted, briefly, each night as pills swallowed, pause, pass over taste buds. Redeemed.
Nothing is static. Everything’s vertiginous.
Time slows, its ends ragged and unkempt.
The interstitial planes of illness
Crickets continue, regardless, into the night, and during the day— the sparrows
Every night a spider makes a web on the mailbox, and each day I dismantle it to clip the outgoing mail.
What happened: the inconsequential fabrics of you. Your actions, thoughts, your appetites, your failures. It came down to this: emptiness, desolation, and the utter disregard (or never-regard) in anything you. Your breath, your death—nothing.
With this fatigue, it’s as if I can’t remember how to use an apostrophe.
conclusions/contusions, demonstrative/monstrous, recumbent/repugnant, incognito/neato, offal/awful, orion/onion, toady/ today, rumors/tumors
Almost every word seems wrong on the page.
dissenter/disaster, levitation/leviathan, saving/saying, deluded/diluted, dearth/death, digerati/didgeridoo, breadth/breath, fitted/fetid, miasma/melasma/my asthma
All four dogs around me on the floor.
A small black bird tattoo in the crook of my arm, a little companion to watch over me.
She said, I feel like I could cease to exist.
Echocardiogram this morning: why did the tech pause and magnify over the aortic valve?
The orchid on my desk re-bloomed on the one-year anniversary of my surgery.
Xanax Nation: my constantly squeezed panic
Let me think of the possible ways to love
A blackbird sings out over the marsh
transect/traverse/trajectory/transcript
iris/ibis, dentistry/density/destiny, fiction/friction, Mephistopheles/missed-opportunities, toe hold/toad hole, ponies/peonies, comestibles/combustibles, Datsun/dachshund, vertebrate/ventilate, Ehlichiosis/air lickie, O sis
Chemo-time, a recalibration of moment to moment— here here here.
We fill our homes with things we think we need. But I am tired, my vision blurred.
After all that happened, no wonder I wanted a protector, a guardian—and sought out a large male German shepherd, and found Murray, a lamb with a formidable but sonorous bark.
Pain, posture, presence.
I am exhausted by the future tense.
Is it isolationism, disassociation, prioritization, compartmentalization, dual identification, refuge, retreat, de-culturization, recalibration?
Subverting vertigo, as vertigo subverts the Go—a long-term incantation of can’t-do-this (again), help me not stumble or fall.
Living in five year increments
Is this where the What-Ifs turn upside down into Not-Ifs?
Reclassification/declassification of tumor type, rewriting micro- metastasis = metastasis with the happier not-equal symbol. Also: you can use the internet to prove anything.
coelacanth/see, ya can’t, nature/mature, incision/decision, O, grr/ogre, impotent/important, foam/phone, symphony/sympathy, townhomes/trombones, suppurate/separate, wretched/ratchet, excellence/elegance, trifecta/disinfect, a, uvula/ululation, mammary/memory, emancipation/emaciation, weather/wither, ionic/tonic, elegant/elephant, el dente/Dante, refried/refined, rhododendron/dodo, rapture/Wrap? Sure, butter/bitter, access/abscess, misogynist/massage, honest, murmur/murder, urgency/surgery, spot/stop, casts/cats
If lonely, think of all the multiverses out there, replicas of you waving back in unison.
Even as I try to be a vessel for light, I fill with gravel.
How can we not think of summer in the middle of winter?
Yet: grief tempers as time passes, a hue in everything, a softness.
A map. A path, traipse in, and back through.