Sample Poems by Robert Fox
A New Person
The doctor appears in the lobby.
The mastectomy went just fine, he says.
I find Susan in her room
where she sleeps so still
in fetal position smaller
than she’d ever been
head bald from chemo
a homunculus
person of the future
projected from an exhibit
at the Museum of Natural History
I remember from childhood.
The future implodes.
More chemo
won’t allow time for hair
to become vestigial.
Bodies shrink not from disuse
but disease.
A new person emerges
an adult fully formed
except for what surgery removed
a new person born
with all the experience
needed to take on
a fight to live.
The Woman Who Insisted on the Texas Protocol
The woman who insisted on the Texas protocol has died.
At least that is what Susan was told by another Susan, who also completed
a bone marrow transplant for metastasized breast cancer. Our daughter Jessica
babysits her two daughters. The woman who died also had young children. Susan
had spoken with her, too, recently. The protocol from Texas, spreading out
the amount of Taxol infused with Herceptin, seemed to work for both of them.
I come upstairs to wash for bed. Susan joins me in the bathroom, asks me to
check her head. The empty stripe across her skull, a negative Mohawk, reveals
new follicles. Hair returns on each side, some fine strands curl, others lay
flat and point towards her forehead. Once I kidded her that one half would
bear lush curls, like the first hair of childhood appearing after her bone
marrow rescue, and the other would lie flat. Now each side bears a wispy promise
of both. At the back of her skull two parched circles where nothing grows.
“It’s where I got the boosters.” Meaning
the radiation following the removal of the tumor from an anterior ventricle.
Brain surgery. Now she sits on the rocking chair rescued from her grandmother’s
bedroom, and I sit crosslegged on our bed as she talks about the woman who
insisted on the Texas protocol. She’s angry that her clinic, also a
fine teaching hospital, did not know that a 75% dose of Taxol, weekly with
Herceptin, gets better results than one monthly dose at 100%. She’s
grateful for reduced side effects, though she wishes her hair would grow.
She wishes she could do without Taxol altogether, which causes her toe and
finger nails to discolor with fungus, pull away from their beds.
I do not tell her it worries me that the other woman, on a similar regimen,
has not survived. As if Susan has read my mind she explains, “She had
more metastases. It spread all through her bones and liver.”
So far the protocol works for Susan. As if by miracle the
lesions vanish from her liver. She has no other signs of cancer. But she has
an aggressive disease. Her first breast tumor went undetected by a mammogram
three months before it appeared. By the time it was removed it spread to four
armpit lymph nodes. Three is the cutoff for Stage I disease.
After three recurrences, after many rounds of chemo and
radiation, will the cancer cells find a way to outwit the antibodies they
attract, which lock them into senescence? This brilliant antibody’s
molecules are too large to pass through the blood brain barrier. If the insistent
deviant life form recurs in the brain, there’s little chance of survival.
The Thought Of
The thought of Susan dying slaps my face
like the news itself, as if it happened.
Why this pale image on a day
vibrant with color
a painting of corn rows in Nebraska
luminous as the outdoors
over the black marble mantle
in the office where I stuff
conference folders?
She is recovering again, has begun
exercising now that Herceptin
and Taxol have rid her liver of cancer
… at least the lesions are gone.
So why do my eyes water?
Is it the memory of our shared youth?
Do I again see myself facing mourners
unable to deliver a funny portrait
of her contradictions?
Drawn back to the ring
against brain surgery, shingles,
radiation, steroids…. Each victory
has its price. She is not the person
she was, not who she would have been.
It’s harder for her to stretch
remember who phoned the night before.
But most days she beats the contestants
at Final Jeopardy. My answer is
Why do I know nothing
nothing at all?
Last Birthday
Susan thought this birthday party
was the last she’d make for either
of our children. She spent the day
making sauce and preparing cheese
for stuffed shells, the dinner Josh
requested. I made a garlic bread
in the machine, finished in the oven
when the power glitched, and a large
green salad. Alex came with a box
of petits fours from Mozart’s Cafe—
two years since we’d seen him—
and Angela, from St. Louis,
Jessica’s pal and roommate to be.
Good food, lots of laughter, snow
on the ground from a late season storm.
Two tumors in the brain, one
fairly large, the oncologist’s nurse
said about her latest scans.
Susan imagined octopi seizing her brain
with their tentacles. The end of the line.
Days later we learn from the neurosurgeon
the difference between tumor and lesion.
And the larger one mostly scar tissue
from last year’s surgery. “Your brain
is healthy,” he says, pointing at the MR scans.
“Normal tissue hasn’t been affected.
The gamma knife should shrink the lesions.”
This would be the least invasive procedure
in more than five years of treatment.
But after the reprieve, day of buoyancy,
life back to normal, the neuro-oncologist
says inter-arterial chemo to the brain
administered through the groin
in monthly installments, will
give a better result than the gamma knife;
says he also glimpsed “enhancement” in the
spinal fluid. The treatment? More chemo
through a reservoir installed in the forehead
beneath the scalp. He wants a spinal tap
to confirm.
At the appointments desk
the secretary grips the calendar
with a prosthetic hand.