'This Refined, White-Sheeted Torture'

My tutelary spirit of recent days has been the American poet L.E. Sissman, dead from Hodgkin lymphoma at age forty-eight. Out in the hall I spoke with three oncologists  after they had yet again examined my brother. I asked the question no one had yet asked: How much time does he have? The guy in the middle, without hesitation and much to his credit, replied: “Weeks.” I had already expected as much. My brother has become nearly the opposite of himself. For more than half a century he worked making custom picture frames. He is a craftsman and loves wood, collecting exotic species like ebony. He was enormously strong and he had the forearms of the guy who delivers beer kegs by hand, but they have shrunk. His voice is a pained rasp because of the mass in his esophagus. He used to be the second- or third-funniest person I had ever known. 

Sissman’s “Homage to Clotho: A Hospital Suite” was published posthumously in his Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L. E. Sissman (1978). Sissman often wrote suites of poems, as his punning title suggests. One needn’t have cancer or know someone who does to appreciate the wit and craft. This was not poetry written by a victim, for victims. It was written by an adult, that endangered species, for adults. Clotho, for the Greeks, was the youngest of the Fates, who spun the threads of life for all mortals. On Tuesday I witnessed most of the scene recounted in the sixth of the poem’s seven stanzas:

 

“The riddle of the Sphinx. Man walks on three

Legs at the last. I walk on three, one of

Which is a wheeled I.V. pole, when I rise

From bed the first time to make my aged way

Into the toilet, where, while my legs sway

And the pole sways, swinging its censer high,

I wait to urinate, and cannot make

My mortal coils distill a drop, as time

Stumps past and leaves me swaying there. Defeat:

I roll and hobble back to bed, to the

Refrain of cheeping wheels. Soon the young man

With his snake-handler's fist of catheters

Will come to see me and supply the lack

Of my drugged muscles with the gravity

Of his solution, and I'll void into

A beige bag clipped to the bedside, one of

The bottles, bags, and tubes I'm tethered to

As a condition of continuance.

The body swells until it duns the mind

With importunities in this refined,

White-sheeted torture, practiced by a kind,

Withdrawn white face trained in the arts of love.”