eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Moving and uplifting, this compilation of mostly short poems conveys the author's personal battle with breast cancer, from the initial mammogram through biopsy, several operations, radiotherapy treatment, and recovery. The poems express the reality of balancing a challenging, life-threatening disease with one's daily routine, proposing small distractions and coping mechanisms while charting the passage of time by procedures done, books read, appointments made, food cooked, and dreams dreamed.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781775581536 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 88 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Slip Stream
By Paula Green, Nigel Gardiner
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2010 Paula GreenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-153-6
CHAPTER 1
She drifts in the slipstream
of the slim margin.
Sometimes she worries that she is not worried.
She is very calm. Like the white page before she begins writing
or the water in the cat's bowl.
She wonders if she should yell at passing cars.
Or get wild and pull out all the weeds along the grass verge.
She just wants to get on with things.
On the first day (a lifetime ago) a diagram
is sketched to show where she is and she hears
good news (she will be cut to be cured)
although she is suspicious of the fat gape
between medical jargon and English verbs.
How to drive out into the world?
In the organic shop she thinks she is hallucinating,
the organic produce produces streams of organic colour
that match the organic voice from behind the inorganic counter.
Nothing feels solid enough to walk upon,
but she takes her apples and pears to the inorganic car
trying not to fall through organic space
or slip through to another universe.
They fly to Queenstown but she has to bear
the weight of a phone call mid-air
('ninety-five per cent of women
in your shoes have nothing
to worry about'). Privately,
she laughs at her small collection of footwear,
mostly Chucks, and the way numbers seem to fall
like shooting stars and picture books
on the bright side,
according to the oncologist.
She is used to off-road driving and the weakness
of chance. They drive for hours through pillars of rocks
the burnt horizon a sleepy distraction.
It's not a deep-seated worry,
just a flutter of the imagination.
She meets a woman who has had the same operation and
the woman says she never likes the way people
say I know you'll be fine when
the future is unpredictable, as random as love
or the way birds shit on her car roof.
The woman says she is very sure she will be
all right nevertheless, and to do something special each day
like walk
on grass with bare feet or drink fresh guava juice
or write a poem about split seconds
if that was what took her fancy.
She drives to Devonport and walks in and out
of Devonport cafés as though the finest wire holds her to the
Devonport earth and her skin is made so feeble she can barely be seen.
She likes the thought of prawns in a Thai broth but the room is empty
and the dish vile so she walks out into the Devonport sunlight
into the chocolate shop and picks out ten Devonport chocolates to fit
in a little chocolate box like she is a French writer with a taste for
Devonport sweetness.
bonjour madam
bonjour madam
bonjour madam
She had a dream she was in hospital and decided she wanted to get a magazine from Magazzino. So she went out into the bright light and got into her van and drove around the corner to a side road off Queen Street. She got her bicycle out of the back of the van and rode around into the shop (ten seconds). But the shop was full of people bent over screens. Can't see any magazines, she said. No, we do virtual-lee anything, said the skinny man. So she rode her bike back round the corner to the back of the van (ten seconds) and drove back to the hospital. She got back into bed.
She dreamt she slept until five to eight on the night
she had to be there at ten past.
She decided to ride the bicycle (36 kilometres)
with her lover on the crossbar so he wasn't stuck
with two bikes to bring home. She ducked in
and out of the traffic jam like a tricky
chicken, panic driving her legs until a small
voice within the dream told her the alarm
had not yet sounded. They arrived like sparrows
silent in the waiting room, entertained
by the thought of time to spare, the floors
shrill. He left her
in the second room, all the boxes ticked
and she packed away her street clothes,
dressed herself in cobalt blue,
blue feet, a matching hat
and the infinite scope of the present tense.
She is in the chairs. She has Kate Atkinson's
latest detective novel to finish and two cryptic
crosswords but she loses her way in the grid
imagining she is five hundred trees
in the burning heat.
Now she is in the La-Z-Boy. Four women
and a man sit along the wall in the very narrow
space, perhaps they are stuck in a dinghy.
She imagines she is a girl having fun
displaying her blue feet, and they are stuck
in an ice-box. A woollen blanket is laid
upon their knees, the blue feet
sticking out like the blue bonnets.
'And why are you here?' they ask.
'Knees,' they say.
Five across must be a pulse.
She imagines she is the fish in a continental river.
She concentrates on Jackson's conundrum
of bodies; missing like a pain in the stomach
or the need to make internal rhyme.
The television set is so close they could all reach out and touch
the never-ending shriek of infomercials, an odd sedative
before the world vanishes on the count of three.
Tucked between the gold bracelets, the cheesiest soufflé
and the green milk bath (to restore one's youth)
a woman advertises a cave just outside Assisi.
(Once the woman discovered her terrible disease she went to the cave
because she needed to journey deep within the cavern of herself
if not the earth or a best-selling novel.)
Perhaps the woman learnt how to move in the world with grace,
she wonders, and shuts her eyes at the miracle of kitchen scourers.
Nobody thinks to change the channel or talk about beauty sleep.
At the first biopsy she engraves a triangle
on the Venetian blinds
rides along the flat, ascends the vertical
and then slides down
the sharp angle.
Waiting in the hookwire room
she tries to impose a triangle
on the wall, but the Christmas paper
bundles together cherries
and holly. Her loop turns
into black sand with the fierce ocean
and the dogs chasing the gulls.
That was Sunday.
They had walked along the beach to O'Neill's Bay
gathering names for the sun like yolk and butter
and she had watched a crab feed itself. On this day
when it seemed like they had the whole world to themselves
the poor crab had company. But later when even her awkwardness
melted, they closed the beach to remove a body.
She loops the cherries and the holly
through the time passing
because it is almost Christmas
and difficult things fit
through the eye of an needle.
She is back in the chairs.
They are all coming and going
like wayward ideas.
Here they can tell strangers anything.
How congested the motorways are on weekdays.
How they make do without breakfast.
How Jack can't make a risotto to save himself.
Jackson is trying to make sense of the Russian dolls.
She falls for this narrative, one doll hidden within another
and she has to concentrate so she doesn't get left behind.
She imagines everything, even the grains Alan gets on his shoe
or the sugar mouse broken by a father's involuntary tic.
This is a room in transit like the beach
when you don't know where the tide is at.
Everybody walks past in gumboots and blue balaclavas
but she is on a bed
holding tight to loose endings
with her book finished and
the Herald cryptic crossword finished
and half the Listener crossword to do
like she is so buoyant she can take a mouthful
of last ice-cream.
Will she look upon flowers or
the redeeming quality of Miss Darling?
There is a backlog of knees so she has her pre-
op meeting just before she goes to theatre
(absolute seconds), and now she is petrified
of the exact moment as skinny
as the swerve of a fantail past
her study window. It all feels too rushed
[to receive flowers]
to understand the oxygen mask is placed
over her mouth so she can breathe and how
she might lose sight of the world or how
(nine down) she will check about nervous tension
just her, two sips of water when she wakes
and a call for metaphors.
She moves through the recovery rooms like a watermark
(see how they all squint)
until it is time to get dressed and make
the paper bag on the bed beside her make sense and
make her dead limbs remove the blue paper suite.
The world feels soft through the car window and she wants a map
of mysterious things or the journey home or
how to make gingerbread
because she can barely speak, or even a hole in the ground
by the primary school, the anaesthetic pressing
until a car pulls up beside her bare feet.
Two girls cautious, pale in the hallway
walk towards her, the palest thing
as though she is in bits and pieces. Two hand-stitched
cards stitched with the daughters' love.
How to lean the ladder against the wall or empty
the teapot or make a summer salad with heirloom tomatoes
or bake a lemon syrup loaf? In the night the pain
keeps her awake so she reads anything
she can lay her hands on but she can't remember
the name of the novel steeped in Dickensian detail
or why the character sat on his hands.
The surgeon had sat on her bed, when she doesn't recall,
and asked if she had any questions, no matter
how petite. She couldn't see any question marks because
her thoughts were free floating like little thistle
kisses in the wind but
later in the quiet of the night
she is awake with questions and has nobody to ask
(shower exercise wound) and
in the distance a telephone keeps ringing
because she has not answered it.
The scar is longer than she thought.
It is as long as a slice of toasted Vogel's bread.
She couldn't imagine how the surgeon could slice through so perfectly
and get out the right bits.
The surgeon had looked her up on the internet just before theatre.
Areufimus? she thought she heard.
There is the washing and it is wet.
There is the weather and it is dry.
There are the school lunches and they are fresh.
There are the cat's pyjamas and they are striped.
There is the painting and it is in another room in another building
out of mind's reach.
There is still space for a banquet and it is to include red peppers
oysters and a salad of mixed greens.
There is the regular course of action and how to get through it
without knocking over the ladder
that is leaning against the wall.
(seven letters).
She will eat
a bowl of pasta with roasted courgettes, slow
roasted tomatoes, sweet red onions, pistachios and feta cheese.
When
someone sits on the end of her bed
and talks
in a miniature voice
like a message in a bottle
she is at arm's reach, she is
that close.
Then it is quiet.
She will listen to the radio
maybe Mozart, maybe Bach and
the telephone will always ring
at a distance.
She doesn't try to make poetry
out of her experience but keeps a diary
like a scrap basket, just in case.
She wants an anchor
or the light that pulses like a heartbeat
across her skin.
She sees the water tank
a blue towel on the cabbage tree
instead of a kereru.
A flashback:
She worried briefly that she wasn't worried
as she pressed hard against the machine
that pressed hard against her indifference.
Then out into the Henderson brightness.
Flashback:
Mammogram
Scan
Examination
Biopsy
Nothing is determinate and so she enjoys
the afternoon sun.
She makes a list of things to do because
all about her life goes on, merrily, sweetly.
Christmas shopping
Christmas baking
Move into new study
Get some sleep
She falls into the cryptic crossword and becomes wilful Virginia.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Slip Stream by Paula Green, Nigel Gardiner. Copyright © 2010 Paula Green. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.