Diary

The euphemism is “infusion” when confusion is what happens, and depends on no time in particular especially the middle of the night, last night, on the way to the bathroom, the nightlight the snaky color of the pool I learned to swim in at the Y, with just about the same skill of trying to fly over the water and falling into my body to no depth really but enough to be told to take another turn: so in the hallway, half-awake, I’m side to side and looking down to see how alone I am with the sentimental figure of my bladder ... As just an hour ago, the therapy itself just hours ago (Velcade, Cytoxan, Dexamethasone, needle nothing but a pinprick to the bone), I’m back home and feeling one step at a time when I step off blinded into air from the not-so-dizzy height of the front porch and fall through my eighty-year-old body like a boy again, sink or swim, too much or too little water in the system: hitting the granite walkway first, then rolling helter-skelter down the front hill’s fresh-cut grass. The cure for cancer is to fall, let go, find a landing you can live with, regardless of the time of day or where the light’s soft center is. It isn’t darkest night or brilliant sun off the bright water blinding, only you and the civil ground that is the difference between this/that awkward moment and serious. Pride goeth before a fall, a paraphrase of Proverbs 16:18, whose actual language is the most extreme destruction, caused by a haughty spirit. It was, if I reconstruct it right, my aging humble body dropping down a well to the lawn’s shadow bottom, suddenly worn, but getting up to brush itself and think itself still lucky. My spirit, turning over for that moment lost inside me, falling too, also thinking if thinking is what spirits do.