One Year Out

These are Not Sweet Girls, these breasts. Actually, “this breast,”singular, since one has been cut away and now only one of the girls remains. Not sweet girls, they were never sweet. In fact they were rather bitter, astringent, like pomegranates. Seemingly seeded with fertility, all ducts and milk and marbled with fat, it was unsuckled, with-held and larded with cancer. It Was. Excised, pathologized, sliced into 23 pieces (the nipple was in slice 11. I read the report. I did) in order to determine the amplitude of the disease.

Kingdom of Ordinary Time is the flat side of the multiverse, the ONE dimension we know – how much more fascinating, to travel the EveryWhen, the dream time. “This” world takes on a shine, a glimmer around the edges of my cynicism. I can only bear to live here because I know this is not All There Is.

Praise for a world upside down in a drop of melted frost. The sun setting at dawn, tree limbs reaching for the Earth, and somewhere in that orb, myself, gazing at herself. Praise for the little brown bird, so inconspicuous she cannot be seen, a Tree Creeper, it turns out – blending with the bark fifty feet above my head – praise for her song, waking winter dormancy. “Sap Rise, Sap Rise, Sap Rise” commands her tiny, tiny weightless self. Praise for the artless neighbor felling the overgrown willow onto the lilac in my yard. The insult will stimulate growth, no doubt.