songanddancegirl

BOREHOLES

OF BOREHOLES

“reservoirs of ancient water that occasionally

come bubbling up out of boreholes in the rock”

See this water   cut off from the surface for 2.7

billion years  recently discovered in an Ontario

mine   Do you ever feel cut off from the surface?

Does migraine  vertigo   or cancer perhaps  interfere

with your libido?

When I was 17  after my mother’s diagnosis  I told my

father I’d write a book called: Cancer Colony   He did

not green light the project:   It’s about a world where

everyone has cancer Dad  even the animals!  

When later I arrived at university  +found Solzhenitsyn’s

Cancer Ward  on 2nd yr. Russian Lit syllabus  I rejoiced!

Now some 43 yrs. later  my book  yet unwritten  memories

of my father’s last days writ large in boreholes of memory

Bubbling to the surface on dark fall afternoons  decay in

sinus cavities

Maybe he was trying to protect me from diving into the

cancer machine  +could not foresee a life for me  as champion

of brutalized children +writer of festering poems   He wanted

a brighter path for: the greatest little filly of them all   His auto-

graph  Grade 6  August 16, 1969   20 yrs. to the day he died

Congestive heart failure   5 yrs. after a vein from his leg was

implanted in his heart   Incision from solar plexus to ankle

(They’re gonna cut me from stem to stern  he said)  Forfeiting

heaven for 5 more years of failing body  +mind ravaged by heart/

lung machine (we didn’t read the fine print)

My tough old father did not retreat   He stuck around for another

1,825  days  and 3 to his tattered last still said life is sweet

__

Fall 2016

RIP Lee