No rarity, lunar eclipses,
but often clouds cloak
them or the earth’s spin conceals
them, yet this moon shines
clear and full over
East Bay hills and waits
for the Earth’s slow shadow to fall
across the pock-marked face
and set it glowing red.
The next total lunar eclipse
to be observed from here will occur
in the new millennium
on my forty-fourth birthday.
Monday my first mammogram
came back clouded, a shadow
gathered in breast tissue
that I wait for a radiologist
to compress and magnify, then name.
For the first time it occurs
to me that I might not meet
the new millennium.
Published in: Midwest Literary Magazine,
Green Issue, October 2010.
Once again I face a return to the Imaging Center for a second look mammogram. I have made the second look trip four times in twenty-five years. Developing fluid dirty? Dense breasts? Calcification of an injury? Radiologist wants a different view? Two of my father’s seven sisters were diagnosed with breast cancer. Around 12% of 2D screening mammograms are recalled for more work-up. When I receive the results, I will try to avoid the phrase dodged a bullet this time: One day I may not move fast enough.
The first time I faced this process was 1996. There were several firsts that year: My first new car, my first house, my first mammogram, my first lunar eclipse. When I drove out to the hills to observe the eclipse, I had a notebook with me and took notes for this poem in the car. Before it was over, I had leaned the seat back and gone to sleep.
I shared the poem with my therapist. She asked if she could past it on to another client.
This afternoon, in an attempt to recover more about the origins of Eclipse, I go through a box of folders from earlier workshops. So many poems lost when new computers were purchased, when I left programs like WordPerfect behind. . . . I take time to label the folders on the outside, as if that will reveal much about the contents of each. What do I do with the funky folder labelled “Old Poems?”
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