The Reassurance of Scars

1   My mother and grandmother

chewed on bitterness like pungent tobacco

staining their breath, blackening

their teeth.  As if in a temple

they recited with bent knees and bodies tales

of the dark world, offering

me milk from plastic bottles,

not from anything resembling breast, earth

till I awoke in my poisoned flowering body

at twenty-five with toxins gathered like a waste site,

my cells gone wild,  I began

to learn about the utility of

swords and finely sharpened knives

necessary for clearing, pruning.

I rose from the hospital bed naked

except fo the small white gown and gauze

swaddling my chest.

 

2   I drink, eighteen years later, from bone

China that is waiting

for its broken years. The mint opens

my passages with just a hint

of lemon softened by hone,  What is left

after the emptying

are bitter roots and leaves,

a suggestion of a future.

 

3   Twelve revolutions of sun

have passed, each month

another name.  My son asks:

do all of your friends have cancer?

Perennials rise on the edges of our home

miraculously remembering how

to turn from seed to shoot to flower. Another

autumn comes with the first burnt leaves.  I

remember how I held Jean’s hand as the surgeon

inserted the long needle and it came out red,

like the mums I left at her door

after her last chemo.

It is an early autumn.  The lost breasts,

bowels, ovaries have been turned back

into the earth.  When the floods came in late summer

I recognized this weeping, the kind that can change

a whole landscape.

 

4  My daughter was four

when she finally saw

what I had lost, demanding

an explanation.  It kept her

up at night, the question:

will it happen to me?

 

I try to surround her with enchantment, feed her

whatever I can that is not contaminated.  But she

like Sleeping Beauty, like any of us

cannot avoid the poison apple.

Finally I give her what I have:

my love, a fierce animal

with her old reassuring scars.

 

 

 

First Place Winner of the Ana Davidson International Prize for Poems on the Jewish Experience, 2000.   Published in the San Francisco Jewish Weekly in 2000.