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All summer southwest wind stirs the weeping willows the way my breath disturbs a settled life when I whisper the cancer diagnosis...
All summer southwest wind
stirs the weeping willows
the way my breath disturbs
a settled life when I whisper
the cancer diagnosis.
But this afternoon our clinic
feels far from my garden,
more distant than traffic
pounding the Pulaski Skyway
built long ago without shoulders
where police might hide
to ambush speeders
who roam undetected
like occult cancers.
At random moments,
my mind returns to work,
to tumors growing fast
and invasive as tipuana
trees on the hills of Paraguay,
where farmers slash limbs
with sharpened machetes
to spill blood red resin.
And deep in southern summer
los viejos proclaim,
“The heart is a leaf,
and the wind makes it throb,”
though I would say the heart
of a doctor’s life is the wind
in willows that makes him weep.