Poetry:

...At least, that's how I felt-and by chance, how every survivor I know seems to have felt too...

...But in spite of some quite serious whittling, I've never even come close to that point myself...

...Wrap your head in a flannel scarf when winter begins and only let it out with the crocus or after, when the world turns ash-soft again, if sickness will let you go so soon...

...To judge only from the polio veterans I've known, God has made just about everybody strong enough to take it, so affliction can land where it likes...

...Sickness is almost done and you're not sure what to put in its place...

...A fellow I know lost a whole leg to cancer, and was happier afterward than he'd ever been before, simply because he was alive and the enemy was gone...

...Or so it seemed at the time...

...In short, it cost me nothing less than the best minutes of the day and the best years of my life...

...So far the jury is still out on this one, and long may it remain so, but the Big C, as they call it in show biz, has already left a wintery calling card: without giving away too much, I'll just say that C. has made some mean little inroads into the joy of eating, that last redoubt of the sensual man...

...You wish you were shooting birds, the body of a thousand willows, needing no one, a figure carved from chalk...

...All landing fields are fully equipped...

...Is there a point at which life is no longer better than death...

...and by the time it has tried to frighten you to death and threatened to take away your very existence, you'd be amazed at how little you're willing to settle for...

...White again, the color of death as far as I'm concerned, and back to the hospital for number three, cancer...

...Aunt Josie's eyes bruised and sweet like tobacco...

...Try the photograph of Uncle Charles as a boy, Grandmother's rosewood table...

...Since I've never regarded myself as any kind of Candide or Lemuel Pitkin, who insists on looking on the bright side as life whittles away at his arm, legs, and senses, I'm sure that there must be such a pointsome moment when you're ready to fold what's left of your hand and say enough is enough...

...Commonweal 24 February 1995: 11...

...But how little...

...Remember how Mama would scoop crab apples from a bowl in the sink, checking each one for spots as the water strained between her fingers...

...After each of my "unbearable, insupportable" losses, I have felt not only undiminished and unready to die, but quite goofily elated, as I tried to describe in Lear's...

...Giving up booze felt at first like nothing so much as sitting in a great art gallery and watching the paintings being removed one by one until there was nothing left up there but bare white walls...

...When I was a kid, reli gious folk would say things like "God only seems to send polio to people who are strong enough to take it," but experience has since told me that the folk had it exactly backward...

...If the war is over for now and the bombing has stopped, that's simply how you feel, whatever the damage...

...The long, wary truces of cancer that might end at any moment with a call to arms, or might, contrariwise, last forever, send you a command invitation to speculate over and over about precisely why you're putting yourself through all this and whether it's worth it...

...So one might start the bidding with that...

...In the final scene, the war has just ended and our hero capers around a deserted Times Square in civilian clothes, fairly bursting with happiness...

...Two oranges ripen toward rot on the bedside table...

...Afflictions have an uncanny ability to clean up after themselves, and even leave you laughing, but they obviously can't guarantee to root out deep-seated psychological glitches-although they have a pretty good record with those too...

...Mary Crockett Hill Tangles Not to Be Undone At night you rise, hair slurred into confession...

...As it happens, shortly after writing that ode, or squawk, to joy, I came across a sublime illustration of the mood I'd been talking about in the form of an old, old movie short built around Johnny Mercer's splendid song "GI Jive," showing an average sort of Sad Sack barely surviving the horrors of army life in World War II and plunging at last into the joys of peace...

...I have yet to meet a victim of this plague who has not made a perfect adjustment to it, and then some-Exhibit A being Franklin Roosevelt, whose gargantuan, cartoonlike self-assurance saw us through war and Depression as if they were just more pool exercises...

...Quite the reverse...

...That was how I had felt after each of my illnesses, even though I wasn't exactly dancing by the end, but leaning, like some black-comic character, on a pair of canes, sipping Diet Coke to keep my mouth from turning to dust, and wondering where the cancer would strike next...

...How she made us drink Tang and hot tea until our urine glowed...

...But as I quickly learned, cancer, even more than polio, has a disarming way of bargaining downward, beginning with your whole estate and then letting you keep the game warden's cottage or the badminton court...