REBECCA PYLE

SLEEPING BAG POEM

What if I were to write a poem

About Venus the star

Knowing nothing about Venus the star.

Because I don't. I only see star plump and firm

And big. In all ways sure it is an airplane heading

Toward me—mysteriously stopped.

Waiting, like parked car, parked plane:

Some restaurant for lonely in the

Sky. The Venus cafe the place you park your

Spaceship, whatever headache you

Have. Restaurants! Making life too much like

Repeating cornfield: too many tubular

Stalks, too many leaves like birds'

Wings at rest, drooping, before they are up

Anxiously again, ready to

To leave again.

Corn? Who wants corn,

Its low nutritive value, its

Pointless freight, thousand pearly

Golden teeth? Yes, they could sing you one

Thousand tooth-song—but you'd

Rather not hear again that repeating restaurant

Song. Like hominy too often in the south.

Imagine being—restaurant

In outer space forever, a sweet

Overpriced—Venus cafe.

I know nothing about Venus: know

Only that the moon and Venus

Take turns saying look at me look

At me floating, look at me stopped in large, large

Window in my Venus-Moon room. Both so close,

Terribly close, want to see you, talk to you. But

Not that close: distant like everyone you

Thought should fall in love with you

But didn't, like every hope-boat of yours,

Sunk so low in the water

You think darling I'm sinking soon.

Now, complaint of complaints—why is outer space

Cold? Outer space should be warm, loving.

The Feeling of blue. All science fiction based on—that

Fat false dream of warmth, and blue. Instead—

The fear of falling, being tipped down to

Hostile water. The new hopes, then, important.

Someone who will build fire for you, wear plaid

Sleep close to you at night. Sleeping bag. Someone

Who knows names of birds singing late at night;

Makes actual, thick pancakes

In cast iron pan worth carrying down-trail.

Cast iron pan which surely formed the stars and

The planets, let them sob last

Sorrows—as they last were held in crucible of

Black cast-iron circle, then moved scald-bright

To sky.

EVERYONE NEEDS A SPACEMAN

Why, now that she had had cancer, now that it was in remission, was she even now having thoughts about spacemen? Spaceman-thoughts came faster and faster. Somehow he, who had succumbed, himself, to cancer, was to her, in her demented mind, an eternal spaceman.

He, as spaceman, in always new-looking white suit, never soiled, always brilliant like a brand-new space recruit, kept returning. Orbits of memory returned him to her? Always, his eyebrows rose so high, pure and high, whenever he turned his spaceman head, felt her stare. He stopped still to stare back at her. The clear glass of his helmet made more beautiful his face, its complexity.

She felt guilt. Felt like a bad space agency which had failed him. She could not save him. Someone else’s space agency had saved him. She had failed him. Earth had failed him. She had not joined him. He was happy there. She was unhappy here. All this was Ebert’s fault; she’d read something Ebert had said.

He, American movie critic, had said, after he (to use the horrible phrase) got cancer, that he knew only one way to bear his own cancer: he!d heard (had read) everyone who died of cancer was populating a special planet. Cancer had turned out to be their magic ticket; there they all went, when they died. To live on with each other in saved, cancer-rescued bliss, forever and forever. Their special planet was their club of clubs; their lucky card, their perish-not luck.

Ebert, the movie critic, was dead. Yes, she knew his tale was really just a child!s tale he!d heard and believed, to distract himself. From the horror! His thumbs-up movie review for that dreamy, distant, rescuing planet was a solved-narrative theme. Where formerly cancer-afflicted could live on forever, even making those unlucky-enough-not-to-be-overwhelmed-by- cancer feel envy of those who were afflicted and perished.

Her phone rang now as she thought of Planet Cancer, Roger Ebert. The number looked familiar, mostly twos. She didn’t, however, recognize the woman’s voice. Even when she said her name was Julie she could not remember her.

‘You’ve forgotten me,’ said the woman. The name she said, Julie, didn’t sound correct; it sounded falsified, stolen.

A little like the patted-into-a-mold plaster mask she’s made several months ago in one of her cancer-therapy classes at the cancer hospital, while battling what they called the unknown- outcome stages. That mask now hung casually askew, on her living room wall, above her, to her right. The mask was as if on an invisible tilted head, laughing at cancer. Perhaps it had worked; two days ago she’d even been told her cancer of almost two years’ duration, treatment, was gone.

‘I’m Julie,’ the woman was still saying.

But she still didn’t recognize her voice, her name. People without cancer had become The Others. They didn’t seem real, just as during the worst parts of your divorce the only ones you trusted were other divorced people. In case you did not make it, did not return to normal, unfrightened, life, you began to pack your bags of small casual cheerful friendships, threw them out a window. (If you were, after all, about to travel to Ebert's magic planet, you needed to travel very light.)

‘Oh, Julie,’ she said finally, still not quite sure who Julie was. This Julie might tell her.

‘Yes, Julie,’ the woman said. ‘You are kidding. You don’t remember me? Julie who helped you run our cake sale at school?’

‘Oh, yes, yes,’ she finally said. She was remembering a Julie with shiny hair, who rarely smiled. A game had been waiting to see when or if she would ever smile. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Right after my divorce. You kept me sane. Nestor always gone at his father’s place. Me moving into my apartment. Cancer really makes you insane. I’ve really forgotten almost how to tie my shoes.’

Julie had very shiny medium-brown hair, she remembered. Shiny purses with brass clasps. Flat dark green shoes with woven-leather bits across their vamp. Feeling bad she had not recognized her voice or her name, she tried to compensate. Can I let you be one of the first people to know? she said. I think my cancer, I can’t believe this, learned Tuesday it’s gone. Met with my surgeon this morning to celebrate. We even had wine. On the top floor of the hospital. In the cafeteria.

‘You drank wine at the hospital?’ Julie said.

‘Some break the rules just for us, to help us celebrate,’ she said.

‘That's the best thing I ever heard,’ Julie said. ‘Is it a really cute doctor too?’

This was the reminder, she knew, that she was single, that she should never give up looking. ‘They all look cute when they’re your cancer surgeons,’ she said. ‘Cuter than anyone. They’re God.’

Julie asked whether Nestor knew yet. ‘No,’ Julie said.

Julie then said she and her husband would drink all of a small bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream tonight, in front of their fireplace. They’d even throw the glasses, she and her husband, into the fireplace when done. To celebrate her good news.

But if they did it, she knew, it would really be about celebrating not having cancer themselves, marking a day to pray they never would. ‘Oh, just do it for the Bailey’s Irish Cream,’ she said. ‘You’d be a drunkard who never quit drinking, if you drank for everyone who claimed they were cancer-free. Half of us turn out to have it again.’

‘Who knows. We may even have cancer and not know it,’ Julie said.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Don’t think about that. It could drive you crazy. I’d better go now. I need to tell Nestor,’ she said, though she already knew if she tried to call her six-year-old son, Nestor, his father, who hated her, would somehow interrupt, prevent, the call.

‘Goodbye dear,’ Julie said, her voice as shiny as her hair and her handbags, flat and joyless as her shoes. There was a sound in the background of large ice cubes dropped into glasses. Her husband must have heard the words Bailey’s Irish Cream, was getting ready for on-the-rocks. Or her children were helping her set a table for their summer dinner.

‘Goodbye, Julie,’ she said, careful to put her name into the goodbye, but wishing she would never hear from her again. She could taste the milky, meadowy taste of Bailey’s Irish cream on her tongue, though it was years since she’d had a sip. She looked up at the thin pale plaster mask on the white wall, its black shadow-openings for eyes, nostrils, and mouth, its little crag of mouth too small to look as if it could ever even try to begin a song. A mask representing, she thought, the compound beauty of failures. Even the possible failure of cancer at setting up its brave new world, its colony, of cancer in her. But also the failure of youth and hope. Once there was your youth, the mask seemed to say. Gone. Forget it.

‘Did I tell you I made a ceremonial plaster mask,’ she’d once asked someone at a cancer fund-raiser, someone who’d survived cancer, something ‘stage four’ (meaning their cancer had moved forward seriously, after three dress rehearsals).

‘Voodoo, macabre,’ the cancer-free someone had said. ‘But maybe it will work.’

‘Maybe,’ she’d said, but as she’d said that she’d been thinking of he, already-cancer-dead: she could imagine the snowflakes-falling purity of his another-planet, see its frisky, unmanageable dust going everywhere, like an eternal The Living and the Dead. No sounds to hear. But the new measure of his life must be the tiny chugging sounds of his own breathing he must hear all the time inside his suit, as regular and reassuring as the sound of a moving horse’s hooves. Grateful for any oxygen, he must be, she thought. Any breathing, even his trapped-inside-his-suit breathing.

There will be no services, at David's request—those words had, graceful as goodbye, ended his obit, which she did not discover till almost a year after his death. How odd, she was just now thinking, how obit was like orbit—that little bit at the end— reminding you of bit the dust. His hair, though he was only in his forties, had turned as white as snow.

Goliath was cancer? David had had a rock? (Clumsy and insane logic proofs/premises, continued.) But did David lose? Or he won? Somewhere far away? Or at home? What caused cancer? What solved it? It was all, all of it, Ebert’s fault.

Today, with Julie, on the phone, she'd only half-listened; her mind slipping across a wet waxed floor between cancer and doctors, surgeons and Nestor, her ex-husband and her created mask of plaster. David and the smiling rotund cheerleader for possibly-magical Planet Cancer, the departed movie critic Roger Ebert, who’d given a preview of a planet. Planet Cancer. Which was beginning to sound like legend, like the Plantagenets. Like the land of a million insanely happy Prince Valiants.

She stared down now into her cup of tea with its hot water, its teabag in it looking like a huddling, expired animal. She’d re-warmed it since Julie called: steam rose up from the cup like waving tendrils of Rapunzel’s hair, but going up, instead of falling down. As if Rapunzel was in a spaceship, zero gravity. Going up toward Ebert and the boy, really only a boy, she’d known. Where both Ebert and he were happy, dramatic, characters, in moon-colored space suits which might even be keeping them alive forever, or even returning them to youth. On to their new planet! They couldn’t leave, however—all like early days of Australia, no convicts going back, no return, so they had to make the best of it—

If in space-suits, no one would know he’d once had hair like Timothy Chalamet’s, dark as ocean at night. Yet they could be, she reasoned, on that planet, walking the dust-chill of its surface with no need at all for space-suits: cancer might have given them super-adaptabilities, powers. They might live forever.

Cancer can live forever, doctors and surgeons sometimes liked to tell you. It is magic in that way. Just think, you now have real magic. In you. Charming doctors looked away as they said that, then looked back to you to see if you smiled, too.

Her sudden, surprising return to wellness was a barrier. Possibly forever.

Once as a child she'd unforgettably nightmared: her mother and sisters did nothing to protect her when a gorilla strode in to kill her, coming into her small bedroom at the end of a long California hall. They pretended they did not see the gorilla—rocked, talking to each other, in their three happy rocking chairs in the living room, as they let the gorilla walk past them. To kill her.

Was the gorilla a warning about cancer she would have? And was it defenses her body had built up against that gorilla-nightmare—like a ready war-shield which had formed her body’s adept defense against cancer?

But, in defending her against cancer—had her nightmare ricocheted on her again, separating her, evermore, from him? Thus, the gorilla, all told, was the disaster of becoming separated from him, sentenced to a curse of ordinary life on Earth? All of it a maze, an angry gorilla in it who wanted to kill, specifically, her, wanted to make her its meal and sustenance.

Everyone needed a dream of a spaceman, but he, Spaceman, powerless to save her, would become further and further away—the more well she became. In short, she could now be alive, but dying (someday to be dead), though she was well; and he, her pure spaceman, had died of cancer, was gone, but had gone on to be blooming and rich and lucky and alive. With Ebert and millions of others. All of them on that planet sparkling but shadowy behind the sparkling clear face-shield of a spaceman's suit, the greatest and purest mask of all time, much happier than she on Earth with her desperate cheap little mask made from a mold, with plaster. They had rescue. Here she was on Hell, with the other undeserving and unchosen, on Earth with its temper-tantrums of moisture and life and death and burials, yes, here on Earth-Hell, she the ordinary, the fooled-into-believing she had been saved.

BIOGRAPHY

Rebecca Pyle is a writer of stories, poetry, essays, and reviews appearing over the past decade in many art/literary journals—mainly journals created in the United States, but also journals created in Hong Kong, Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, India, England, Ireland, and Northern Ireland. Her writing and artwork (see rebeccapyleartist.com) appear in over a hundred journals and reviews, including Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, Underwater New York, The Moving Force Journal, Posit, Die Leere Mitte, FOLIO, The Kleksograph, Otis Nebula, Los Angeles Review, The Galway Review, The Honest Ulsterman, MAYDAY, New England Review, Terrain.org, and LandLocked. American, Rebecca has been living/working the last three months in France.