Osteosarcoma: A Love Poem

Cancer loves the long bone,

the femur and the fibula,

the humerus and ulna,

the greyhound’s sleek physique,

a calumet, ribboned with fur

and eddies of dust churned to a smoke,

the sweet slenderness of that languorous

lick of calcium, like an ivory flute or a stalk

of  Spiegelau stemware, its bowl

bruised, for an eye blink, with burgundy,

a reed, a wand, the violin’s bow —

loves the generous line of  your lanky limbs,

the distance between points A and D,

epic as Western Avenue, which never seems to end

but then of course it does, emptying

its miles into the Cal-Sag Channel

that river of waste and sorrow.

I’ve begun a scrapbook:

here the limp that started it all, here

your scream when the shoulder bone broke,

here that walk to the water dish,

your leg trailing like a length

of   black bunting. And here the words I whispered

when your ears lay like spent milkweed pods

on that beautiful silky head: