Marilyn Hacker: Cancer Winter

 

I woke up, and the surgeon said, ‘You’re cured.’ Strapped to the gurney, in the cotton gown and pants I was wearing when they slid me down onto the table, made news straps secure while I stared at the hydra-headed O.R. lamp, I took in the tall, confident, brown-skinned man, and the ache I couldn’t quite call pain from where my right breast wasn’t anymore to my armpit. A not-yet-talking head, I bit dry my lips. What else could he have said? And then my love was there in a hospital coat; then my old love, still young and very scared. Then I, alone, graphed clock hands’ asymptote to noon, when I would be wheeled back upstairs. (...)

The hand that held the cup next was my daughter’s – who would be holding shirts for me to wear, sleeve out, for my bum arm. She’d wash my hair (not falling yet), strew teenager’s disorder in the kitchen, help me out of the bathwater. A dozen times, she looked at the long scar studded with staples, where I’d suckled her, and didn’t turn. She took me / I brought her to the surgeon’s office, where she’d hold my hand, while his sure hand, with its neat tool, snipped the steel, as on a revised manuscript radically rewritten since my star turn nursing her without a ‘nursing bra’ from small, firm breasts, a twenty-five-year-old’s.

These fourteen sonnets interweave themselves to form a unified work, just as lines are repeated or echoed to interweave in the individual poems, providing an account of the author’s experience of breast cancer, radical mastectomy, and recovery. The medical details appear more prominently in the early sonnets, but gradually, other themes take precedence: suffering and how to compare relative degrees of suffering among individuals and groups; the reaction of oneself and one’s lovers to a disfigured body; and the search for affirmation, for a reason to want to live and be rid of the horror of disease and death.  
The theme of comparative suffering recurs in the twelfth sonnet, as Hacker remembers friends who died, or strangers whose death she read of, all of whose requiems she feels inadequate to sing. Hacker even acknowledges in the fifth sonnet that this recurring issue has its limits, "a form of gallows humor," but her poems are nevertheless her effort to "do what I can." Given that so many sufferers find these things nearly unspeakable--whether war crimes or diseases--the sequence of sonnets is a powerful achievement.