Cancer/writing Journal #88

 I went in for my three month cancer check-up this last week.  Again, my PSA # was too low to be detectable.  My good cheer at the news is getting a little obligatory.  But I am glad to have that be my biggest complaint. 

 I had heard that it takes cancer about three years to figure out how to get around the treatment I am getting.  I asked the oncology PA about that and she said that it's her experience that if the cancer is going to figure out a workaround, it could do it in about one year.  It's been close to two years for me now.  So, I am left in a place of optimistic uncertainty.  Which is just fine as far as I'm concerned.

Here's a poem I wrote for my writing group:

Charlie Schaefer

November 2022

Starry Street

I take my little dog out at night after the rain,

Where it’s cold, damp and dark.

Up the road is a street light,

Its sodium bulb shining blue and silver.

Under the light, pebbles protrude from the asphalt

Wet, reflecting brightly in the night.

A little imagination,

A little adjustment to the mind’s eye

And it’s a starry night,

But in an alternative, better universe.

Packed in tight with a shine

Undimmed by atmospheric dust.

The night lit up with glowing starlight.

Such an abundance and oh, so big!

Mother Hubble’s cupboard overflows.

She is warm and generous with her store.

But my little dog wants to go back,

Out of the chill, damp and dark.

We return to the warm, fully lit house

And get set for bed.

Mother Hubble is an inside joke.  One of the other members of the group has had a series of poems dealing with what has been shown through the Hubble Telescope and personifying the whole deal with the nursery rhyme.  Members of our group thought it ought to be taken out, that is seemed a little forced to have it included.  I'm staying with it here--and I don't know where else there is.  For one thing, unlike the nursery poem where the cupboard was bare and the dog got no bone, I like an overflowing cupboard, not that there was anything in it for my dog.

By the way, I have gone out at nighttime after a rain to the same street light and it doesn't work.  I can't make my mind see the stars as I did the time I wrote about.  Just wet asphalt.