Terato

The horse has been let out of the stable,

was how they explained it. The surgeon opened a door

and it bolted straight for your heart. The horse

is a tumor, you see, muzzle at your left lung.

Like an animal, it doesn’t know any better.

Holistic believers told you to poison it

with cilantro and for weeks your mouth and fists

were green as insurance. These were the same people

who advised me to bring bells, salt and stale bread

into our new home so that ancestors could bless us and feast.

The house was infested with tiny white moths to feed,

enough to believe they had been sent to chew the cancer right out.

Never could get used to hospital rooms and their imposition

of a stadium or a Honeymoon Suite, the fray of recurrence.

It was Winter, in its palliative uniform, that brought sleep.

Your hair: monastic. Your hands: dulled. Every cell like an oar

on a Trireme. Terato, your ancestors named it.

Monster. Oma, a mass. To marvel at a mass of monsters.

Even the cats, moaning at the mornings, moaned

as a Greek chorus. But you, you read whodunits aloud

and gave me the eyes of a lady noire, eyes like wet stones. Eyes

like strange sins. Benign structures threw themselves like damsels

against the skyline, water towers and steeples that had been there

all along  now seemed more auspicious to the plot.

The tumour was a Brasher Doubloon, something that could be

discovered, retrieved and returned. Your cells rearranged themselves,

set your scalp to the promise of Spring, gave your hacking hands

a leather glove and placed you on the diamond. Maybe the game

had your ancestors in mind all along, our hearts sloping

towards nostos, inning after inning of mercy, mercy, mercy.