"Perhaps grief, because it makes clear the value of what might be lost, is one of the essential experiences that carries us, like music, toward meaning."
It's hard to find anyone whose life has not been touched by cancer. Friends, relatives, close loved ones .... it's a painful journey to experience, no matter what your vantage point. My sister, the most courageous woman I know, thought she'd licked her breast cancer five years ago. Now it's back with a vengeance. She and her husband are valiantly taking each day as it comes - that's pretty much all you can do. But the days - filled as they are with hospital visits, medications too numerous to count - apparent progress and good news followed almost immediately by setbacks and disappointments - seem to require more strength and courage than imaginable. She appreciates every small pleasure that crosses her path. And she takes special delight in her one-year-old granddaughter. But there's no denying that this journey is a very very difficult one.
Which is why I am so grateful to have found Dzvinia Orlowsky's affecting and passionate book of poems, Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones, an amazing collection of fierce and unflinching observations about life in the cancer lane, with all its paradoxes, heartaches and - yes - lessons.
"Orlowsky's poems about illness possess the necessary audacity to be fully human, with the insistence on missing absolutely nothing---at once beautiful and broken; magnificent and terrified," wrote Foreward Magazine in the review that prompted me to purchase this book for the library. The book just arrived today, and I have been unable to put it down. Orlowsky writes about waiting rooms, chemo visits, hair loss, and prostheses with an attentive eye, a dark, ironic wit, and an unwillingness to sentimentalize.
Note how she embeds her emotions in everyday language in this portion of "Losing My Hair." The kicker, for me, is in the last line:
I couldn't bear to wrap it in toilet paper,
throw it out.
I carried some strands to the woods,
spread them on the ground
for the birds to lift
into their nests.
I placed some more strands
in an empty hornet's nest,
its gray center welcoming
my hand.
The hornets are gone,
but the birds might come back.
I wrapped the last few strands with some horsehair I'd kept.
A few thick pieces of a black mane
I'd pulled riding once, out of fear.
Later, in the same poem, she describes a visit with Donna, a hairstylist, whose got some wig recommendations:
The first wig makes me look
like an airline ticketing agent.
The second one drives a school bus.
The third one, curling around my mouth,
wants sex. That one couldn't be worn
near an open oven door.
The dark one, like my mother's hair,
loves the rain,
travels well in a small box.
Donna says Try this human hair;
it fits like a silk glove.
but it's short, thick Oriental hair,
a gold medallist, figure skater's hair.
Donna says the reason my complexion looks so sallow
is because of all the chemo.
I leave the yellow of her fitting room.
Sweeping the floor
around my chair, Donna says
After the eyelashes and eyebrows go,
your eyes will need more bang.
These poems are painful to read in places, but comforting nonetheless in their unsparing honesty. I've always found that honesty offers a special kind of solace during especially painful times in life, probably because it too often is the first casualty. I appreciate and admire Orlowsky's determination to be honest with her readers and, obviously, with herself.
She also fulfills one of the primary purposes of poetry, which is, as one reviewer notes, to show us how "to look, to attend, to inhabit fully."
If I could grant one wish for my sister this summer, that would be it.
- Nanette
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