He says their half-life, halved 
and halved again, means that in half		
a year they’ll be used up. Meanwhile, 
they’ll boil and burn, taking the tumor down, 
those jail-break cells, those riotous lost souls 
with creepy witchy lethal minds of their own.

The cure is not as risky as the disease, 
so yielding to his penciled calculations,
leaving my loved-ones in the waiting room,
I lie between bolsters in a loose green gown, 
half-conscious as he slits behind my scrotum,
inserts four dozen radiating seeds,
and sews me up again. 

I dream of a distant airport, my arrival,
where, showing a luggage token to the guard,
I slip inside, but it’s a maze, Palladian,
high-ceilinged, multi-stair-cased, and no telling
where the bags will be. 

In the recovery room, a nurse 
leans over me. How do I feel? she asks.
Any nausea? No. But my vision 
isn’t sharp. I doze till she returns. 
“Can you wiggle your toes for me?” 
and I say, “No.” But when she lifts 
the bottom of the sheet, ten feisty toes
like Black Forest gnomes alive to her suggestion
are mocking me and wiggling on their own.
                        

One gray animal walked to the edge of morning.  
The moon was behind it and the road 
wound north, an infinite hill.
And as there was simply no 
reason to proceed 
with the project it had set out on 
days before, it sat down.

				Eyes 
are all I see of its gray face 
staring into the morning 
chilled past all desire 
having at last come to the end.
                        

A sun-swirl, egg-over-easy, with a swatch 
of rainbow colors left and right 
as the day-long winter evening fades,
Orion riding shotgun on the night.

But driving isn’t easy on the ice,
and up a snow-packed hill the engine falters.
I back up blindly, landing in a snow-berm 
with a jolt. Shaken, breathing deep,
I’m taken by an old refrain: how beauty
is allied with pain. 
				The moon’s a flower 
through a cage of spruce. Stars seed the night.
And soon a passing stranger stops
and frees me with a push—they usually do.

I shoot the hill again in second gear, 
but when I rush the turn—default—
an unfamiliar driveway brings me to a cabin 
where a sign warns: “Killer Kats—Beware!”
I shout, “Hello?”…“Hello?” 
The radio’s tuned to folk but no one’s home.

So backing slowly down the drive 
I try the other fork… bright lights, 
a barking dog and voices, candles 
flaming on a tree (our hostess guards 
it with a pewter candle snuffer), as, 
perplexed at how the north’s adopted me,  
I place my cooling moose stew on the board.