She said the word and the room rearranged itself around the word,
The objects in the room stayed where they were but I heard,
Them settle into new positions in the gravity of it,
The lamp, the window, the desk where she was sitting at the bit.
I had known something was wrong in the way you know before,
The knowing, the low-grade signal from the corridor,
Of the body that says something has changed inside the frame,
And you’ve been half-listening to it without a clue.
The cancer diagnosis, the word that reorders the room,
The cancer diagnosis, the specific bloom,
Of information that reorganizes who you were,
Into the person who now knows, the definite slur,
Of the clinical into the personal in the chair,
The cancer diagnosis and the rearranged air.
She laid out the treatment options with the careful care,
Of someone who has done this many times in that chair,
And knows the sequence of the patient’s cognitive,
Absorption of the information and how to live,
Inside the disclosure without overwhelming the capacity,
That’s already running at the limit of its audacity.
I took notes, which surprised her, she said most people don’t,
I said I need to have the information in a written font,
Because my mind is going to fill with other things at home,
And I need the map for later when I’m sitting there alone.
I called my brother from the parking lot before I drove,
And said the thing that had to be said first, the cove,
Of the diagnosis laid out in as few words as possible,
And then we sat on the phone with the impossible.
I drove home in the late afternoon and cooked the dinner,
Which was the thing I’d been doing before I was a winner,
Of this specific lottery and would keep doing after,
And the smell of the garlic in the pan was the chapter.