spring 1963 Back home from three years’ monastery life, working in Europe, he’s in love with these pacific Heights and genteel streets named for fruit trees that could never grow here, with Willow Street, especially, the yellow house where he lives with Jack, where each dawn they hear—amazing!— a cock crow from some neighboring yard. Mornings he walks the Esplanade above the docks and the traffic seething below towards the city, the tall dazzle of its skyline a jagged, brilliant rising from the East River. He notes the flower man with his archaic dull horse and cart, the young mothers pushing carriages, their candy-bright hair teased high, and makes his way to the end of the docks, where the neighborhood shifts into abandoned warehouses and dim alleys, where there’s a haunted hotel, a fabled ghost who passes each morning by a fifth-floor window. He’s waiting, unable to finish the book he knows will make him, until the courts decide: will they swing or no? They write him from their death row cells. He sends them cigarettes and books—dictionaries for Perry, porn for Dick. Swing or no? Once, Perry told him, Dick ran down a dog on the highway, just for fun. That’s the kind of man he was. Not like him, Perry said, he was never mean if he could help it, made Mr. Clutter comfortable before he cut his throat. The wind off the river smells of bait and coffee from the trawlers, and the June mornings fairly gleam. Far west, a Methodist crypt amidst the wheat fields and prairie wildflowers, the sealed Clutter house also waits—for the living to claim what its dead no longer have a use for: pie tins stacked and shining on a kitchen shelf, a girl’s locked diary buried among schoolbooks, her father’s boots ready by the mud scrape. Beside a narrow bed, left where he can find them in the morning, a boy’s thick glasses. Reprinted with permission from Hotel Amerika (Spring 2003.) Athens: Ohio University Chinese-Western Poetry (Fall 2006). Macao. Poetry Forest (Fall 2006). China. trs. into Mandarin by LuYe Chance of a Ghost. Eds. Gloria Vando and Philip Miller. Helicon Nine Editions, October 2005

THREE POEMS FOR JUDI by SUSAN AIZENBERG

1. First Sign Day after day, the fecund, mis-shaped cells doubled and re-doubled inside her, infused her blood’s unguarded channels and spawned their rank tumors, unmaking each tissue-woven host — her left lung first, then her brain, then her spine and bones, brute Vandals at the marrow. For weeks, or months (the doctors know so little), she felt nothing, until that morning in August, a special class for teachers, when her hand refused to move or hold her pen, and curled limp against her paper, a small, stunned thing. It seemed, she said, so strange, and yet familiar, too, like that scene from a thousand old westerns: the dozing scout startled to a fury of dust, the first, faint sounds of horses approaching. 2. The Nonself: Some Things She Said To Me In cancer, non-intelligent cells are multiplying and you are being replaced by the non-you. Immunologists class the body’s cancer cells as ‘nonself.’ Susan Sontag, Illness As Metaphor This is Hell, J. says from her hospital bed, and I don’t mean Hell, I mean Hell. Like a comic lush, she slurs her words, Atavan and morphine swelling her tongue. Pupils shrunk to motes. Bald now beneath her cotton turban, sparrow thin, her body’s soft tissues devoured by cancer, she seems some third sex, the nonself the doctors speak of. Outside, the leaves burn rust and gold, brighten as they fall against an indifferent sky. She crooks a finger I can almost see through, hisses: She wants to kill me. She’s crazy, that nurse. You think I’m crazy, but she’s the one. I want to go home. I want to walk again. Why won’t you take me home? You don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know what this pain is like. You’re putting this in your next book, aren’t you— 3. Meeting the Angel Not as a bird with twelve black wings and an eye and a tongue for each of us. (Someone dies each time he blinks.) And not shrouded in celestial light, a fair-haired castrato. Not as Samael, angel of poison, his venomous sword quivering above the parched, open mouths of the dying. He did not come as Azrael, whom God helps, bearing apples so sweet their fragrance kills our fear of leaving this known world. What did we know of death, of suffering? Each day for weeks we drove the autumn highway to the clinic, where the angel’s rough map ablated J.’s skin with the blue tattoos of radiology, black dissolve of surgical stitches. And like, or unlike God, he was always with us, among the lush, ongoing trees, the small mercies of fresh air and afternoon light leavening the cracked glass, our hearts’ stutter, as we reached the exit. Reprinted with permission from Muse Copyright © 2002 by Susan Aizenberg Crab Orchard Poetry Series, SIUP