I Watched You Disappear Read online

  As when I lay on a gurney before surgery,

  my eyes fixed on the nurse’s crucifix.

  As long as I could watch Christ’s hanging body,

  I was calm; and in that brief and conditional

  courage, God came and erased fear’s bruises

  from my neck and stayed with me, who wept.

  The Buried Moon

  We must walk to the wet and sucking bog.

  Each of us holds in her fist one candle,

  charm against the wisps and crawling horrors.

  It’s in darkness we’ve been living lately,

  lonely among those gifted with easy hope.

  And then we see her, pressed beneath a boulder,

  coffined under the stagnant pools, rotten

  green-black water into which we must reach

  our hands, heaving up the weight together.

  (No one woman could lift the rock alone.)

  Beautiful sister, rising now, bright-haired,

  your face shining free of marsh weeds,

  borne back to the sky—light our waning

  with your waxing, cast in silver our keening.

  in memory of Kristin Sanner

  The Firebird

  The wood of No-name grows closer.

  Already, you hear the slow hoof beats

  of elk crushing the moss, you wake

  to cicadas trapped on the screens.

  Charms are trembling in your pockets,

  longing to leap into dark pools

  where the green tongues of algae will dull

  their gleaming skins.

  Now is the time to claim the burning egg

  in the bird’s belly, to win the crystal

  in its shell of flame. To let your name

  singe itself on your ribs—

  your body, a canticle.

  The clouds will arrange themselves into minarets.

  The bell ringing in your throat will drown

  out the train’s slow grieving.

  Notes

  “Dedication”: This poem is loosely based on the structure and themes of Anna Akhmatova’s “Dedication,” the introduction to her great poem about the Stalinist Terror, Requiem. My poem, which makes no claims of comparison to Akhmatova’s, is in honor and memory of women with inflammatory breast cancer, especially Paula Ford, who created the image of picking a scab and saying the rosary.

  “Three Salvations”: The Spasitel, or Spas, are three autumn holidays traditionally celebrated in Russia. They have pre-Christian origins as harvest celebrations. The word spasitel translates as “salvations.” The three Spasitel are the Honey, Apple, and Nut festivals.

  “The Dybbuk”: In Yiddish folklore, the dybbuk is a restless soul who takes over the body of a living person.

  “I Watched You Disappear” is a variation of a line from the Tom Waits song “Watch Her Disappear.”

  “Periwinkle”: Periwinkle is an ingredient in the chemotherapy medication Navelbine (Vinorelbine). As the fifteenth-century quote from Apuleius indicates, its healing benefits have a long history.

  Part II: These poems are loosely based upon images from the Grimms’ fairy tales. The stories are: “Jorinda and Joringel” (“Owl Maiden”); “The Drummer” (“Maiden in the Glass Mountain”); “The Three Little Men in the Wood” (“Strawberries in Snow”); “The Girl without Hands” (“Silver Hands”); “Fitcher’s Bird” (“The Flowered Skull”); and “Achenputtel” (“The Hazel Tree”).

  “Valentine Godé-Darel (1873–1915)”: Valentine Godé-Darel was the lover of the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler. In 1913, she gave birth to a daughter and was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. In the next two years, until her death in 1915, Hodler painted and drew her numerous times. His paintings display, with both great detail and honesty, the wasting effects of illness upon her. The individual paintings about which I’ve written are sometimes reprinted with varying titles. To examine the whole collection of paintings, see Jura Bruschweiler, Ein Maler von Liebe Und Tod: Ferdinand Hodler und Valentine Godé-Darel: Ein Werkzyklus 1908–1915 (Kunsthaus Zürich, 1976).

  “The Buried Moon” is based on the Irish fairy tale of the same name.

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications, in which the poems listed first appeared, some under slightly different titles: America: “Saint Sunday”; Bellevue Literary Magazine: “Owl Maiden” and “Strawberries in Snow”; The Christian Century: “On Our Anniversary,” “Nut Salvation,” and “Apple Salvation”; Christianity and Literature: “Ubi Caritas Deus Ibi Est” and “Portraits in the Country”; Crazyhorse: “The Overcoat” and “The Firebird”; Five Points: “I Watched You Disappear,” “On a Line from Virginia Woolf’s Diary,” “New Dress,” and “Skirts and Dresses”; Georgia Review: “Valentine Godé-Darel”; Image: “Advent, First Frost” and “Russian Bells”; New Ohio Review: “Stage IV” and “Leaving the Hospital”; Poet Lore: “Chasing a Grasshopper at the Ocmulgee Indian Mounds” and “Doing Laundry in Budapest”; Southern Poetry Review: “Late Renoir,” “Borscht,” “Sexually Explicit Lyrics, Ash Wednesday,” and “Paper Mill, Macon”; St. Katherine Review: “Night Prayer” and “Honey Salvation.”

  “Leaving the Hospital” was reprinted in Ted Kooser’s syndicated column, American Life in Poetry, February 20, 2012.

  “New Dress” was featured on Poetry Daily, www.poems.com, on January 16, 2012.

  I’d like to thank Jacqueline Osherow, Margaret Gibson, Nicole Cooley, Alice Friman, and Kevin Cantwell for their generous, invaluable help and advice in reading my manuscripts and bringing them to completion. Gordon Johnston also read and advised me on many of the poems in this book. I hope that each of you sees a little bit of yourself in these poems. David Bottoms and Megan Sexton, of Five Points, gave much-appreciated encouragement.

  Thank you to Betsy Lerner, creator of luminous photographs, for her author’s picture for the back cover.

  I am so grateful to LSU Press for trusting my work and for bringing it to an audience. Thank you to MaryKatherine Callaway for her compassion in understanding my personal circumstances, and to John Easterly and Catherine L. Kadair for their kindness, editing, and general helpfulness.

  Thank you to my oncologists, Dr. Massimo Cristofanilli and Dr. Linda Hendricks, for helping me live for as long as I have, for their compassionate care, and for not being afraid of hugging a patient.

  The poems in the first section of this book are in honor of my sisters with inflammatory and advanced breast cancer, including all the women on the IBC listserv and Facebook groups, my sisters in struggle.

  Thank you, especially, to my dear friend, the late Kristin Sanner, who threw me lifelines time and time again. Thank you for being, as poet Jason Shinder writes, “my friend out here on the far reaches of what humans can find out about each other” (from “Coda”).

  In memory of the pathfinders, especially beloved Paula Ford, heroic and irreplaceable Lori Grennan, Elizabeth, Brenda S., Ester, Janet C., Jen, Sandra, Mary, Gwen, Susan, Holly, Jenny, Tryna, Marie, and those who died after this book went to print. May their memories be eternal.

  I have been nourished and cared for in my journey through cancer by so many wonderful friends, too many to mention by name here. Thank you to three of my angels: Oonie Lynch, Sara Walcott, and Molly Martin.

  To my parents, Christel and the late George Krugovoy, whom I could not love or treasure more than I do for their gifts of life, faith, and comfort, and for teaching me what matters in the world. Я люблютебя

  And thank you to my own dear sister, Claudia Krugovoy, for your gift of unfailing love, support, and friendship: “For there is no friend like a sister / in calm or stormy weather.” Ich liebe dich.

  As always, my profound thanks to my beloved best friend and soul mate, Andrew, the first and best reader of all my work and the source of my life’s great happiness. Thank you for your selfless love, your loyalty, and for bringing me joy and peace even in the
darkest times. We are two trunks of the same tree, and though chronos may pull us apart, we will be inseparable in kairos. I love you. This book is for you.

  This book is also for Noah, with your mother’s deepest love. Nothing else I’ve accomplished in life is equal to your birth. My pride, my hope, my laughter, my miracle, my blessing. Grow farther toward the moonlight, golden branch.

  And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes;

  there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying.

  There shall be no more pain, for the former

  things have passed away.

  —REV. 21