Landscape from the Body

Take breast cancer and curve your palm.
The renegade cells divide like sheep
or roadside weeds in the remote
stratum of bosom, which is also
a kind of field men lay their hands on,
women, too, before parting the rosary’s beads
in dumbfounded reverence
for what the breast is. Angelina,

sixty-eight and the mother of seven,
knows how the body, the soil,
parts to ripen. She knows, too,
the friends who, all fall and winter,
sewed fleece hats to cover
her bald head as though
quilting a woman. But this morning

when she appeared in her bathrobe
without a hat, a shock of hair
skimming her head, and she reached
for kindling to start her morning
fire and caught my look,
she smiled, dropped the wood
and sifted her hair through her hands,
shouting across the yard, “Look!”
We laughed past the body,
clothesline, fence. Laughter

that was no fool. A simple cache of heat,
she rose and flared. Months before,
I watched, almost embarrassed,
as she opened her shirt to outline
the scar sliding like a cloud across
her chest. There, the cancer
rooted and was pulled. Our laughter,

so easy, quickened us, as if we had crossed
the finite border between terror
and terra, where a woman
might be made again.

copyright 2007 Susan Varnot
bio
Barnwood magazine
Contents 07