The three-year-old with tight
yellow curls stood by the back porch’s
screen door, his stolid legs
in shorts, wearing a sweater, holding
a carrot in his right hand:
I feel myself inside his face.
For a week my mother pulled a carrot
from the back garden
for my supper; this evening
I pulled it myself and brought it
to her. Her pride wrote postcards:
“You’ll never guess what Donnie did!”
Today, sixty years later,
I gaze at the loose flesh of my
upper arm, where muscle flourished,
sagging wrinkled and puckered
like the flesh of my calves and thighs
hanging punky and useless.
As I wait outside the Infusion
Room for the 5FU
to heat my hand with its eighteen
CCs of poison, among
other skeletons of flesh
ingesting similar poisons,
I feel pity for my racked body
that sickens itself to
try to remain itself. Then I forgo
self-pity by the
only turn that discharges self-pity:
Among reading stacked
in the waiting room, I observe
a copy of Goodnight Moon.