'Life Is So Long'

Several years ago I was diagnosed with a condition called MGUS (pronounced EM-gus) -- monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance. It’s a symptom-less and in most cases benign disorder, but it can be a precursor to multiple myeloma. It means I see my oncologist once a year, pee in a cup and have blood drawn. On Thursday I was sitting in the doctor’s waiting room with a dozen other people, most of them roughly my age, several of whom appeared unwell and unhappy. 

Usually I bring a book when I see a doctor but this time I forgot and was reduced to browsing one of the literature racks on the wall. In a pamphlet I discovered a wonderfully acronym-ed disorder – POEMS syndrome (polyneuropathy, organomegaly, endocrinopathy, monoclonal plasma cell disorder, skin changes). One doesn’t expect to find comic relief, especially of a literary nature, in an oncologist’s office.

 

The unexpected linkage of disease and verse reminded me of cancer’s poet laureate, L.E. Sissman, who was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1965 at the age of thirty-seven. How thrilling and brave that a poet who had cancer for eleven years and died of the disease at forty-eight should begin a poem with the phrase “Life is so long . . .” and that it should be published posthumously in his Collected Poems (1978). No one has written so unromantically and with such wit about the certainty of a foreshortened life as Sissman. Never “inspirational” in the banal sense – no cheerleading or related fraudulence -- his humor and mastery of craft inspire admiration. Here is “Spring Song,” written in the spring of 1972, four years before his death:

 

“Life is so long the passage of the seasons

Blurs like a carrousel before the static

Eyes of the onlooker who, rising fifty,

Grows slow and oaklike, dying in his fashion

Of imperceptible progress to the autumn,

While grasses spring in unison from the meadows

Full-blown in seconds, lilacs bloom and blacken

In minutes, apple blossoms shuck their petals

And grow green fruit in hours, ashes open

Fistfuls of leaflets, whose light-green veins darken

To forest green, lighten to tones of copper,

And fall down in a day to usher winter

Into his complex of spare silver branches,

His winter palace, in a growing silence.

I hate, as agent for my slowly failing

Senses, my withering sinews, drying juices,

And hardening heart, these hasty evidences

Of what I’ll come to in the coming season

Of reckoning, when all the green will vanish

From expectation, all anticipation

Of folly to be rectified tomorrow

Will perish, and a leafless log of body

Will be cast on the wood fire in December.”