whistling past the graveyard
Ted Kooser I live in the aftermath of cancer, the green reforestation period after the great fire, the brown high-water line drying to dust on the siding after the hundred-year flood, one lane now opened on the mountainside highway, a sheer drop to the sea on one side, cluttered by tons of broken concrete, a few chunks with sections of bright yellow centerline leading out into the blue. I’m not alone. My wife is at the wheel of our life together, wind in her full, lovely gray hair. I’m on the passenger side, giving myself my mid-day tube feeding, trying not to spill into my lap. I live on cartons of a prescription formula for diabetics, with ample washes of water. Medicare picks up the tab for my feedings. We’re on our way into the rest of our lives. I don’t think I’ve ever before used the word aftermath in something I’ve written. Something awful that has happened to one little old man, however seismic he may have felt it to be, scarcely merits the use of the word. But the etymology tells me that “math” comes from Old English and describes a meadow that has been mowed. So an aftermath is what’s left after some kind of crop has been harvested, and I am what’s left, a meadow now dusty stubble. The crop was malignant, like the black mold that ruins a whole stand of corn. Once smut’s in the soil it can keep coming back, and I’ve had three oral cancers over twenty-five years, most recently nine hours of surgery during which the right half of my jaw was removed and replaced with a section of bone from my left fibula— one of the two bones below the knee, not the shinbone but the