With only six months left you insisted the cancer was nothing.
Long after the surgeon mutilated your breast, the stones chipped away, like
Wind erosion.
And when the chemo took your luxurious red hair you didn't even panic,
Or cry the blues.
Your dignity intact, swathed your wound with a replica of long, dense curls
Once beautifully yours.
"It'll come back," you said
And like you, it never did.
And they were there in prayers,
Your hours of wake and fitful sleep,
Even in those fleeting moments of hearty, rambunctious laughter, the renascent
Interludes of hopeful remission.
They were there when the beast coveted you, when it
Tossed you about like a stuffed rag doll,
Knowing full well it wouldn't go away.
And the medications you refused to take, saying the painkillers made you sick,
While that awful machine made you look like a fat elephant.
And then you were difficult to hold,
A fighter, beating back the searing pain.
Your tortured soul imprisoned in a miasma of gray-shark agony.
They said that you were incontinent,
That there was nothing left in your eyes but emptiness,
A fathomless, queerlike glaze.
And then all of a sudden something rose from the abysmal beast and you were
Raging against it, cursing it, but not God: "Go away! Leave me alone!"
And then you were wrestling with it - even laughing in its cruel, ugly face.
Someone screamed!
But it wasn't you.
Because you didn't even mention the loan, the twenty dollars, so I could enter
That poetry contest,
I need to repay you as much as I needed to win. Remembering that I was
Terrified of losing,
Your pillars holding up my faith.
"Don't worry, Boo, Baby. You'll win," you said.
But I never did.
What shall I do now?
I still have your photographs,
The treasured memories,
When you were so much more beautiful.
You mailed them to me before your tragic denouement.
Enclosed them in your long, sweet letters, daintily perfumed with kindred,
Preternatural love.
"Remember me, always," you wrote.
As if you thought I would forget.
I'm looking at your face. Ah, royalty!
Mute and queenly, your composure,
Stilled against the timeless depths of wondrous light, etched in snow frosted
Frames, which capture the very essence of you.
You, at home, at work, at church,
Even at the beach.
Your soft, round face radiant under the golden sunlight,
Or luminescent under the silk-white moon, wild and persimmon behind the
Glowing bottled candlelight,
In an exquisite restaurant of your choice.
Where are you now?
I need to know - the signs in the Favonian wind.
With wandering eyes I'm searching for you, beyond the orange-red sunset, in
Journeys to Utopia, deep way down in the hidden crevices of the earth, and
Even in the billowing fragrance,
Seeping from the wild, crimson rose.
Perhaps the gods were kind to sprinkle the crystal dust of your soul amid the
Crumbled ruins in the ancient city of Acropolis;
Would you, someday, majestically rise, like tall, marble beams against a
Cobalt-blue sky?
"Oh, don't be silly, Boo, Baby," you would say. As if I were still your pesty
Little dreamer.
I wasn't there when you left. But it was the dead of winter, they recall, a
Sad, gray, miserable day. You gave it all up, let it all go,
Your eyelids fluttering like wings of wheeling alabaster doves, your hands,
Cold and lifeless.
Dropping low against the sweat-stained sheets - like the haunting dance of
Ghost-shadows stretching further and further over a barren, snow-kissed
Field. And they remember the faint, brisk expulsion of your hot, gasping
Breath, garbling on the wind, whispering, even,
As you slipped away,
On time's winged chariot,
And you didn't even say goodbye.