Miracles
Karen
Alkalay-Gut
From far away everything looks like a miracle,
but up close even a miracle doesn’t look like one.
-
Yehuda
Amichai, “Miracles”
Miracles
Contents
When you came home from the hospital 12
Statistics just explain away the wonder 16
Perhaps if I were the patient23
I suppose the whole thing only begins
with what you think is due to you
and how much you’re paying attention.
You and I
like to live randomly:
The puppy we found on the street
who peed on our carpet
as soon as we brought her in --
We kept her.
That night the tests came back --
you were half asleep when I logged in and saw
them
and you continued your journey into dreams
while I surfed all night, lost in a web of
facts,
suddenly grown up, with real death before me
and only a virtual world to commiserate
You tell me lymphoma
What do I know
where it will go
I am here at this moment
just home from our visit
out of one shoe
off balance to hear
the news
Lymphoma
It can be cured.
Right?
Back in Ward D
I slip into your bed
two orphans
in a lonely world.
A hushed silence falls upon the audience --
in this case the patient,
and me
curled up
next to him
on the narrow bed.
And as if
an extra old lady
mattered to the diagnosis,
the big nurse booms,
“This is really not all right,”
And I leave the stage.
What if I suggest
you stop asking questions
There are other ways
to show us you care
And I'm scared enough
without trying to think
Of what will come next.
to tell me
how to help you
your distended stomach
your pain
is strange to me
I am ashamed
at how little
I know
The few words I catch
from the cold
diagnosis
the PET scan
before
we deliver it
to the physician
read danger
all organs
Alert.
Even the doctor
seems disturbed
even though I know
he is used
to dead end
discussions.
After the diagnosis
After the laproscopy
After the PET
Your face spoke to me
from another world
Lit from a reflected source
at an angle
Diffused
Translucent
I could not be sure
if it would grow
or fade
the nurse calls out
to the waiting room. I am there
filling out papers.
"Go upstairs to the lab
and deliver this order."
I do not want to leave this space,
but trace my way through the halls
glad to be able to do something
that will move his cure forward.
"Come back in half an hour,"
the girl says, shutting the door
on me, having taken the prescription.
I rush down to hold your hand
then back up to snap on
the plastic glove
and take the plastic bag
with the cherry solution
from the sterile shelf.
At that moment
it is an honor
to be a wife.
Up close it seems even more of a miracle
There is poison pouring into your veins
That could save your life.
I call it the cherry elixir
And we laugh.
The hunger to survive can poke through even the
rockiest of earth,
In many colors
One human, slipping off the edge
into his own grave
is pulled away
by countless hands of
anonymous people
who may never know
the specific wonder they bring
The thing about miracles is their unexplainability.
Disasters always seem traceable to some cause or
other.
But surprises that cannot be reasoned away,
they happen
before your own eyes.
If you close your eyes
as if in prayer
you will hear as many pleas to Allah
as our Lord.
It is not only the problem of letters:
that when you focus on them, you can’t see
beyond.
It is the whole throng of words
bunched together in uneven fragments
with no apparent leader, or even limitations.
The logic of them escapes me
and the idea of sequence itself
seems so dependent on mere faith.
In the hospital the believers read the Psalms
blindly, rocking back and forth
and sheltering their shamed faces
in the tiny white wings of their books.
Perhaps some day, they pray,
I will be free enough from fear
to see one idea follow another
and be led through the shadow of death.
(from the Yiddish)
Who has given you the evil eye
May rough bark cover his hide.
Who has given you the evil eye
May rough bark cover his hide.
In the forests there are four clefts
May the curse disappear in their depths.
In the forests there are four clefts
May the curse disappear in their depths.
A summer dress hangs on two pegs
The sash flutters out, like a butterfly
Who knows where it belongs
and the wind fills out the flowered bosom
as if spirit alone
was enough to give it life
cancelled the treatment
just as were off to the hospital
we went to get the car washed instead
and as the system of water and brushes
took us into itself and spit us out
we felt right at home
left on my pillow
over a year ago
and slipped indifferently
into a now forgotten handbag
when the hotel room was cleared
falls out onto the floor of the ward
this moment
recalling
the amazing time
before what I know
now
I would be keeping a journal
writing down my feelings every day
like a fever chart, watching the chemo
seep into my body through that slender tube
Perhaps if I were the patient
I’d allow myself the luxury
of debating philosophies of will
imagining the forces of good
working against the debilitating ill.
But I’m the little elf
dancing around the IV pole
trying to actually find something
to do.
Always I speak of shades of grey
but that day, sitting in the waiting room
reading the PET scan results
it was all black, BULKY in caps:
stage four with fingers in every organ.
Now it is white, with a few treatments still to
go
but I cannot say the word grey
without feeling the way
life may exist today
and grade into the other
at any given moment
Sit
And look at the fish
The prescription
Will be ready soon
And you
Can take it down
To the neurosurgeon
For the intrethecal treatment
Look
At the fish
The grey one hasn’t moved
Just keeps looking at you.
Statistics
the doctor says
and smiles
Now that
in itself
is a miracle
the fear of the evil eye.
It is not the terror of jealousy
but the knowledge
that once you announce joy,
it is absolute
and therefore
can be inverted.
as a matter of fact
make a gift to the hospital
and don't look back
I think
now I know God from within
After such an illness everything
seems trivial, a waste
of strength needed to deal
with doctors, medicines, tests – living
in a real world.
Maybe that was the deal:
You get back the light
of your life but
no will
to write
a simple poem.