BEFORE THE AFTERLIFE
Early in our love,
we sit in the Swan Room,
ceilings high as a tomb,
blood-heavy curtains,
clusters of moon lamps.
Fake swans lurk
everywhere. Over
dirty martinis, cloudy vials
of brine, we reveal
our death plans:
ashes for both.
Water, I say,
my body scattered
into sea or fjord.
It will be cold,
but I will bear
the cold. Between us,
olive pits, clumsily chewed.
Mountains
for him. So we will
part at death.
I raise my glass,
its clouded clarity.
Now the light leaves us
in increments, mystifies
the room. The faces
are already flattening.
His eyes flicker,
a salty blue depth.
The drapes are unbearable.
Why do I feel cold?
we sip our martinis,
one infinity, another—
***
MAGRITTE’S SUN
The surgeon describes ovarian cancer
like paint and my fallopian tubes
like a set of paintbrushes, freakishly swirling,
picking up one drop of paint here
to dab it somewhere else.
I feel you sway beside me.
Your nose looks gray.
Last Saturday, at the Art Institute
we were startled by a red sun
in a Magritte painting.
A sky bright as blood, the sphere
hovering in thick trees.
Here I can see what is hidden—the sun setting
behind trees, alarmingly visible,
pasted over the forest like a cutout.
Perhaps the waiting
is the worst part of it all.
I am not sick yet.
The surgeon goes on to say,
if you dabbed paint inside my purse,
that purse could pass through an X-ray machine.
You would never know
the errant cell of oil paint
smearing and spreading and bleeding
inside. You look less and less well
as you place an arm around me.
Of course, she is making the argument
she must make: given data, we must fear
what we cannot detect.
There are graveyards in me.
I think of us in that shadowy gallery,
our eyes yoked to the red sun on the wall,
glowing like anxiety. If they don’t cut
into me, they’ll never know.
Somewhere inside you,
nausea is a climbing vine.
All night in bed, your hands
will skim my body, sculpting my breasts
and stomach, grasping for what
no one can. Then you cover me
with your whole self
as if the threat looms from the outside.
The sun over trees, its stunning
red alarm, its laser eye.
