CANCER
It could well be in as few as 20 years time that all forms of cancer will be treatable, but writing in 2005, it is the nightmare of our age. We generally outlive our biological function and live long enough for the cell replication systems of our own bodies to break down. Friends and acquaintances in their 50’s are dying of various forms of cancer. My friend, Quentin, developed multiple myeloma or bone cancer and then unluckily a completely unrelated non-Hodgkinson’s lymphoma as well. Some of the following poems are a sort of chronicle of his progress. Some of these poems might make more sense if you knew that Quentin and I both had an interest in genetics, that we bred together the elusive pseudo albino guinea pig, sundry poultry breeds and coloured corn.
Yellow Chicken Coop
I have finished the chicken coop,
All level, all as planned, all true.
A cock dominion for Wooster the rooster,
A cute little condo for all his hens.
The nest boxes are cosy, snug and dry.
All is shipshape and waterproof.
All it lacks is a cluck of approval
And a lick of paint.
Many years ago Quentin and I
Bred Old English bantams,
Plucky, game, fire combed roosters.
You remember the great yellow sunflowers
We grew for their heads of seeds
And the Indian corn, brave in red and blue,
Barbara McClintock’s wampum maize. (Barbara_McClintock)
My chicken coop has a hinged roof
That can be raised for ventilation
And an access ramp with little treads.
I check out the shed for tins of paint
And find a large rusty tin of something
And half a pint each of yellow, red and blue,
Oil based, so I’ll need to buy some turps.
Quentin who knows everything there is to know
About diabetes, diets and nutrition,
Tells me I should feed my chickens lucerne
And lots of yellow marigolds, so that the eggs
Will have deep yellow yolks
To give us goodness, health and longevity.
I decide to mix together the three small cans,
The poppy red, the summer yellow
And the blue of a young man’s eyes in love
And produce a can of cemetery grey.
Quentin has had his blood test results.
They are pretty sure he has myeloma.
On Thursday we drive to the hospital
And on the way we visit chicken fanciers
Where I hope to purchase breeding stock.
One young couple has Wyandottes
In smart A-frame accommodation,
Show standard birds in perfect nick,
Not a feather out of place.
She culls each imperfect chick.
An older lady has Australorps
And Barnevelders down under the willow trees
In a jumble jungle of chicken wire,
Rusty sheets of corrugated iron,
Lengths of chain-link fencing and bits of wood,
All cobbled together and stuck with a glue
Of equal parts, mud, feathers and chicken shit.
In the hospital I watch the specialist take
A marrow biopsy from Quentin’s pelvis
Who bears it bravely, less concerned
With pain than farting in the face of death.
Diagnosis confirmed we drive home.
I open the other tin, the rusty one.
It is a latex paint, water based,
But I dilute it more and stir furiously.
The brown gunk turns orange and then
Warms up to sunflower yellow.
I paint the coop - walls, floor and roof
And pretty little ladder
A heart-stopping, eye-catching, breath-snatching,
Butterflies come to mate with it,
Screaming, defiant, yelling yellow.
Myeloma
(multiplemyeloma)
My friend is under attack
By cells of terrorists.
His walls are undermined.
The integrity of his architecture
Is sabotaged.
His vertebrae collapse one by one,
Fold accordionwise
Like the floors of skyscrapers
Falling onto the one below.
Shared memories
Rush out of the basement,
Choking on concrete dust
And mill around aimlessly.
Hope flings itself
Out of a fifty-eighth storey window.
Lifelong friends are trapped
In stairwells and escalators.
When the dust settles
And sniffer dogs can scent no more life
Under slabs of masonry,
Will we find enough to identify him by
At ground zero?
Theseus and the Minotaur
(Theseus and the Minotaur)
Theseus sailed across the blue Aegean Sea
With his childhood friends,
To sacrifice to the cruel king,
To face his nemesis
In the labyrinth of his genes.
Lapis lazuli eyes were painted on the prow
To steer through storm and see through night
And navigate his chromosomes.
Theseus enters the maze of fate
To meet his Minotaur,
The monster we all must face
In some dark alley at some dead end.
He must walk all corridors of pain,
Try each and every door,
Although nearly all of them
Will lead to hidden guillotines,
Acid baths, piranha pools
Or bottomless pits.
Ariadne, where art thou Princess?
Bare breasted Minoan girl,
Who spun his tenuous thread of life
From the fleece of the golden ram.
You gave him the ball of wool
Which unraveled cell by cell
As he unwound his way towards his Minotaur.
Theseus may kill the beast.
That was always a figment of his fear.
He may walk out of the labyrinth
With shorn hair and snow white skin,
Transformed, translucent,
His broken blade smoking with black blood.
He will follow Ariadne’s thread
Through the twists and turns of grief,
Through recapitulation,
Through the fast rewind of his life.
He will stand once more
On the shores of the blue Aegean Sea,
As the black sails of his ship
Crack, and fill with the freshening breeze.
Wayland’s Wall
We are scaling Wayland’s Wall,
A great slab of black basalt,
Sheer, vertical, unpredictable
In its cracks and crevices,
Ledges, foot- and finger-holds.
There is no safety line, no apron string
To catch us if we fall.
We cannot abseil downwards.
We cannot simply let go
And float gently to earth
On a pink parachute
As if this were not real.
We reach for a finger crack
And commit utterly to the grip,
All the energy we can muster
Compressed in our fingertips.
For we have abandoned the ledge
Our foot was firmly on a second ago.
On each rung of this giddy ladder
We are not safe or secure,
But we are in dynamic poise.
Don’t look down.
The path behind has crumbled.
There is no turning back.
To move on you must let go.
Sometimes when the next hold
Is still inches above your yearning grasp,
You must make the ultimate commitment.
You must jump and grab,
A leap of faith.
There is no map of Wayland’s Wall,
No prescribed route.
We cannot be afraid as we climb,
For fear freezes our resolve.
There is no greater exhilaration
Than to live each single moment on the wall,
To feel the keen wind fiercely,
To admire a drop of bright red blood
That oozes from our cracked fingernails.
Irongate Stream
The Irongate Stream rises from its source,
The artesian aquifer of the plains,
In a mighty upwelling of ice-cold water.
It flows lustily even in the driest summer
When other streams have slowed to a trickle
And disappeared down the plug hole,
When the green algae peels off the hot rocks
Like the split skins of jacket-baked potatoes,
When the duckweed mud dries to cattle prints.
In the clear-skinned waters of the Irongate
Trout dart upstream in lightning raids,
Detached rafts of watercress float by.
We used to swim our dogs downstream
While we strolled smart casual on the bank
Discussing delightful in banter chat.
Gypsy and Rex would swim current assisted,
Launching torpedo salvoes at flotillas
Of mallard ducklings, who would dive
To re-emerge in tight formation
Around their indignant mothers.
But every dog-walk has its apogee.
Every parabola has its moment of stall.
We shall all soon need to remember
How once we even learned to crawl.
We turn at the Pakowhai Bridge,
Perhaps seeking the freshness of beginnings,
Tracking the Irongate Stream to its source,
It is time now to walk the dogs upstream.
We are dressed casual scruffy,
Murmuring glum in dejected undertones.
The dogs too tired now to deviate for ducks,
Swim doggedly of course against the flow.
The new water, a freshet of energy,
Bubbling with oxygen and bushels of promise,
Will sweep us all downstream to sea
Like a detached raft of watercress,
Just as soon as we cease to swim.
Paying The Ferryman
I make an epic journey to pick up phoenix chicks
Of the semi-mythical golden Wyandotte.
I go to half way to the black stump and the Styx
To meet Bill the boatman in his stockman’s coat,
Slouched hat and glint of cockerel spurs,
A fancy, cockscomb dandy poultry bloke,
It is an eight hour return trip,
Crossing the Nullarbor on my camel,
Mushing my dog team in the Iditarod,
Driving through the green fields of Rohan,
Over the Misty Mountains, past Mordor
And into the depths of the Old Forest,
To sleepy Te Kuiti, legendary logging town.
At first I share the road with traffic.
Some great truck belching diesel muck,
Making its own smog to loom out of,
That sucks me empty of air and sound
In its momentous passing.
Campervans and caravans,
Mobile homes seeking elusive summers,
Famous Five ginger-beer picnickers
Of high endeavour and camping intent.
A double-decker bus with shingled porch,
Painted in psychedelic poppies
By hippies too old to kick the habit.
The destination sign winds up to show
Woodstock, Erewhon and Terminus.
I leave the vanguard of tourists in my wake
And escape into the distance
Of sky kissing vistas, wind carillons,
An horizon of peaks and cloud pavilions.
The landscape crumpled, rumpled like a dog’s blanket,
Broken valleys of a plough turned sod,
Knuckle bones cast carelessly
By some angry gambling god.
These badlands are roamed by nomad bands
Who sweep down on the caravans
To tax and toll and tithe, sell souvenirs
And tickets from their bandoleers.
I skirt Ruapehu, Tongariro, Ngaruhoe,
Volcanoes of unpronounceable grandeur,
Dip my toes in Taupo, the inland sea,
Caldera of some vast cataclysm,
And descend into the wooded lowlands,
The fern rich forests of the West coast.
I am to rendezvous with Bill
Outside the old brick post office at noon.
He has driven into town
In his black four-wheel-drive utility
With oars and crayfish pots,
Tackle box and a spare can of diesel
And a wire and plastic traveling cage.
There is an unusual silence in the street.
Shopkeepers reverse their open signs.
We nod and exchange our prisoners.
He gives me a golden sunshine Wyandotte
And a pullet named Persephone,
Fond he claims of pomegranate seeds.
I proffer him a couple of twenty dollar notes.
He looks at them blankly.
“Do you take Visa or Mastercard?” I ask.
He reaches for his birds.
I dig deep into my recesses
And pull out two ancient copper pennies,
One with Victoria Indiae Imperatrix
And the other Georgius Dei Gratia Rex.
He accepts them, one for each eye.
Stem Cell Transplant
There is a giant space hulk drifting
Dangerously close to a neutron star,
Bathed in hard radiation,
Open to the vacuum, sterilized.
It was once an asteroid mined by men,
Fitted out with hyperdrive, library,
Hydroponic gardens, swimming pool,
Life support and artificial gravity.
Then came the alien shipworms,
Fast breeding, rock boring parasites
That devoured the ship from within
Like the maggots of tiny wasps
Eating a caterpillar alive.
There was only one solution.
The crew baled out in survival pods,
Corpsicles in stasis cryosleep,
Barely alive in a shoal of frozen tears.
And now they return to the mothership.
Weary, weak and blurry eyed from sleep,
They stagger through the air-lock
And check each other’s backs
For bumps of larval shipworm scales.
They wander through the airless corridors,
Seeking the way to the central core.
Once there each keys in his special code
And one by one the systems spring to life.
The Weight of Stones
Life presses his chest with granite,
Boulder upon smooth grey river stone.
His breath more shallow drawn,
His blood running ever colder.
Stones are the slaves of gravity.
He feels their awful weight
Dragging him to singularity,
Yet this is more real
Than all his life before.
“Confess you are but glacial dust.
This is your terminal moraine.”
He feels the tearing of his muscles.
This is the place where sinews part
And whip crack his tendons snap.
At the breaking point of bones
The hyenas will suck your marrow too.
He is time and care and river worn,
Tumbled and rumbled in life’s gizzard.
The spark of spirit is ground down to dust.
“Confess you are but silica and shale.”
But listen to that faint last groan,
“I pray you lay on one more stone.”
Memories of Extravagance
When you shop for basic groceries,
For bread and jam and sausages,
Do not resist that wicked urge
For foil-wrapped chocolate liqueurs,
Or to indulge an orchid splurge.
When you go out to celebrate
And shout yourself a restaurant meal,
Do not deny yourself. Begrudge
Not your grand cru chardonnay
Or raspberry chocolate fudge.
Someday like cancer from the blue
Or an unexpected heart attack,
Poverty will strike you in the night
And you will wake up penniless
In the gloom of economic blight.
Cold beer might drown your sorrow.
Relief cheque bread and saveloys
Might fill your empty belly still.
A jam-jar of wasteland marigolds
Could brighten up your windowsill.
But when, instead of other suitors,
Penury claims the final waltz
In this macabre Gay Gordons dance,
You will only endure this partner's touch
Through memories of extravagance.
Stammtisch at the Thai Silk
Thanks Quent
For all happy hours spent
In chewing fat
Polyunsat-
-urated.
We debated
This and that.
Thanks Quent
For ears bent
To listen,
Shoulders lent
To lean or cry on.
Thanks for sympathy
My high-brow friend.
Our chemistry
My catalyst to poetry.
No coffee-house in Prague,
No Czech mates,
No bistro in Paree,
No musketeers,
Could match our silken Thai
That binds us three,
In company.
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