How Long is a Cancer Year in China?
I think cancer years, the 12 month periods we endure when we or someone we know is battling a disease, are agonizingly longer than normal. And during those years our bodies seem to age in accordance with our perception of the passage of time distorted.
I was scouring old posts about The Unsinkable Ms Yue to add on a new site meant to raise funds for her and The League of Extraordinary Chinese Women when I came across the draft of a poem written one year ago.
The good news is: Ms Yue, though in some discomfort and worried about some lymphatic swelling, has cowed cancer for a full year. Her hair has grown back to the extent that she can almost tie it back with a band. Here is a written toast to Ms Yue, one of dozens of poetic anniversaries that will serve, by comparison, to happily distance her from disease.
AFTER BEING ASKED TO CUT HER HAIR
When she called, yesterday evening
or the night before, I had to walk
into the thick heat of Southern China
toward our prostitute of a River, beautiful
after dark and flattered by artificial light. I found it
especially hard to breathe because she reeks
of factory smoke and poverty.
During the day, the sky, one grey cataract,
ignores the whore whose name no one speaks
with longing in their voice The water was unlined:
a corpse without worry as I began to prepare
a place in my memory for what I would destroy
perhaps forever: The hair, the forty-five years
of silk still glistening with the kisses
of an adoring mother and vigilant father
She asked to me conceal the evidence
of the waning of the infinite. I was told to cut
and shave the perfect blackness, the magnificent
mystery of the history of moonlight, fires,
and the wind that has run fingers
through the remembered and the forgotten.
“Love is so short, forgetting so long”
when it is a name like hers that you clutch
deep in your throat. As strong as she
will be, and as proudly high as she has always
held her head, the quarrel with her body
may always look the same I dressed sorrow
as a bright pearl and suffocated my sobs, because
the still water, so deep below me, could not,
would not, dismiss my questions nor the ones
I knew she would never ask.
Second Draft For YYL October 15, 2006 cancer poetry
No responses yet
