My brother calls long distance, finds me in the Best Western,
in yet another city and tells me, “Bad news: I got it-- Mantle cell
Lymphoma, yea, the worst kind: Blastic. Two, maybe three years.”
The word “Mantle” brings to mind our Christmases—
the long red and green stockings, tumescent oranges in the toes
and tiny Tyrannosaurus rex sponges that exploded
in warm water, quadruple in size, nothing evil really,
pranks---things to dispose of---
but this mantle cell spreads, its protein
deceives normal cells like convicts I imagine plotting
across the hall-- their bullets spang off walls in streets
you never enter after sun down, streets I want to flee.

But where to?

My brother and I entered a gate. The latch of light was shutting.
Huge black heads of Angus bulls,
laying down, stopped us dead.
He said, “Shit. We’re done for.”
I whispered, “Larry never told us about them.”
“What’ll we do? you asked, always the practical one.
“We could,” I suggested, “bow down and worship them.”
“Shut up,” my brother grumbled.
“They do it in India,” I explained.
Their eyes glared at us, their heads as massive as headstones.
“They have no sense of humor,” he observed.
We talked to them, “Nice cows, good cows, pretty cows.”
The dark Angus with horns seem unamused.

What was I thinking? My brother tells me he was dying,
and I retreat to the past. I focus the now, look out the window,
at a man on the street with saliva on his chin,
railing against anything, as if Fault itself is standing there,
its legs spread like John Wayne taunting him,
“Just try and do something you bastard. Just try.”

And then he says again, “Two, maybe
three years. That’s it.” 1,500 miles
between Des Moines and Maine---
and for each mile there is silence.
I want to whisper to him some solace

as we whispered to the bulls, softly like lovers
pretended we were actually fence posts.
We saw the lights of the farm house squint
at us across the field. The herd chewed the remaining light.
One snorted.—a visible breath of God, huge, excessive.
The moon yawned.
They didn’t move.
Nor did we.
We heard, in their breathing. the bulls of Pamplona.
We tiptoed by one, then another, as if we’ve become vapor, then
sprinted, hurdling over golden dung, screaming “Shit, shit”
because we can laugh, “Shit, shit,”
because trouble is something we leave behind,
and nothing, not even a stampede could stop us:
full tilt to the farm where we stayed up all night,
getting stoned, telling stories and eating ice cream
(I mean real ice cream churned from Angus cream)
and woke to a blazing June morning with the cows
grazing contently, as cows do.

What could I say to my brother ? “Shit,” he says,
and relieved, I say it too. “Shit” is the right word,
a word made for trouble.
“Shit” we say in unison like a perfect prayer.


©2007 by Bruce Spang