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enclosed my “cancer” poem (unfinished) for your consideration. It may interest you solely because of its discontinuity from anything else you have seen from me. Whose voice is that, anyway? I had the weird feeling, while working on it, that it isn’t mine. A good shrink could tell me, I am sure.
    Anyway, I’ll be glad to have your appraisal. I know it’s morbid. Is it anything else?
    Everything is high-speed and fuddled here. The prospect of telling you my news exhausts me. Suffice it to say that school is noise, Meg is having a hard time. O for the peace that surpasses all understanding shantih shantih shantih, etc.
    J.
    CANCER
    This sooty film over the tree line,
Over shops, over traffic,
These wires slung, netted over the intersection,
Here, where we are, idling in these fumes—
Is this new territory?
    Do I or does my cancer see
The long-legged woman in the sheer dress;
Hear the click of her step on the pavement?
Is it all spoiled?
Have I spoiled it?
    What has come over me?
My schoolgirl asks.
Cancer, my Death’s head replies.
O rose, thou art sick.
I am failing, slightly, to replicate.
    I am a ruined autocracy.
I imagine cold efficiencies in my lymph,
The reorganization already silently underway.
What fear swells in the throat is superstition here;
Prayer a quaint tradition.
    For the time being
This voice at least is mine.
If you will listen, please,
You will hear where I leave off,
Where cancer begins its song or songs.
    You are the devil, cancer.
You are legion,
Without passion, demoralizing
Me, my family, all of us—
Is this you speaking already?
    No. Cancerous, I can chronicle,
Be true as I can be
To this mute pathology.
It’s important to be true,
And there is nothing else to do.
    Your first question: how it feels.
One feels it very little—
A wan nausea
Which may very well be fear.
You’ve felt worse. Fatigue.
    Perhaps later the flesh will startle.
What startles now is circumstance:
Regardless April is on again,
Sunny, softening up the land,
And geese are pleased enough to swim the cemetery pond.
    All the quiet of a long day home
I muse in a museum of stale concerns:
In this very chair I have cared
Effusively about termites in the porch,
Conceived of,  dared  a station wagon,
    Shaped, reshaped pictures
Of the same income and assets,
Looked to the cosmos for grounds for hating the chain saw,
Daydreamed myself entering, well-dressed and glib,
The parlors of the illustrious.
    Now small narcissisms
Play about a more compacted world:
Something familiar in my fuss
About vegetables and vitamins,
Costs and benefits of a new chemical.
    If I lose my hair to radiation,
I may win six odd, tuft-headed months.
I would read one hundred fifty books,
Hear traffic—and yes, and yes—
Behold in cancer twilight beloved faces.
    (IN PROGRESS)
    11 October
    Mr. and Mrs. George F. Pennington
    3 Bay Road Circle
    Wellesley, Massachusetts
    Dear Mr. and Mrs. Pennington,
    I am writing to confirm officially the sad and frustrating news I conveyed to you over the phone last night: that on the recommendation of the Student Court and of the Faculty Discipline Committee, I have decided to ask you to withdraw Steven from Wells immediately.
    I write this knowing full well the unhappiness this event has caused and will continue to cause in your family. But given the nature of the offense—bringing dangerous drugs into the school and selling them—there is really no alternative. To take any other course would be to disregard the welfare of, and to confuse, the rest of the school community.
    I have always liked Steven and have found him a game, if not an inspired scholar, and an interesting conversationalist. I would not dare or care to assess whether his academic slump over the past few terms is related to involvement with drugs. Perhaps, though, this is a question you may want to pursue as a family.
    Boys make mistakes, even very serious mistakes, and some boys rebound and learn