The Verse That Got Me Through Chemo
I recited it during every drip, a rope of words to hold.
There is a recliner at the Lakeview Cancer Center with my name on it. Not officially. Officially it is Chair 7, teal vinyl, third from the window, with a rip on the left armrest that somebody mended with clear packing tape. I sat in it every third Thursday for five months, and I never once sat down without saying four lines of poetry under my breath first, the way other people cross themselves.
I was forty one when they found it. The radiologist had cold hands and a kind voice, which is a terrible combination, because the hands tell you before the voice does. Within three weeks I had a port under my collarbone, a folder of pastel pamphlets I never opened, and a treatment calendar held to my fridge by a magnet shaped like a lemon, which felt like the universe editorializing.
Nobody warns you about the taste. When they flush the port with saline you taste it at the back of your throat, metallic and wrong, like licking a battery in a dream. Then the nurse, mine was named Priya, and her sneakers had rainbow laces, hangs the first bag, and you watch a clear line run from a plastic sack into your own chest, and there is nothing to do. That is the true shape of chemotherapy. Everyone talks about the nausea and the hair. Nobody tells you about the four hours of sitting still while your body becomes a chemistry experiment you didn't sign up to attend.
The verse came from a book I stole in eleventh grade. A battered anthology from Mrs. Delgado's classroom, mustard yellow cover, someone else's gum stuck flat inside the back. I had kept it for twenty five years through nine apartments, and the night before my first infusion I could not sleep, so I stood at the shelf at 3 a.m. and it fell open, the way books you have loved know how to do, to a poem by someone named E. Harlan. I have never met another person who has heard of E. Harlan. The poem was called Rope, and I only ever kept four lines of it in my head:
Hold what holds. The dark is wide.
Hand over hand, not eye to eye.
You do not need to see the shore.
You need the rope, and one hand more.
I said it in the car in the parking garage that first morning, gripping the wheel, engine off, watching my own breath. I said it while Priya taped the line. I said it when the red medicine went in, the one the nurses call the red devil, so bright in the bag it looks like fruit punch designed by someone who hates you. Four lines, over and over, timed to the drip. It was not a prayer, exactly... It was a rail bolted to the wall of a very long staircase.
A poem you can say with your eyes closed is a rope, and some rooms you can only cross hand over hand.
The other patients had their own versions. The man in Chair 4 did crossword puzzles in pen, aggressively, like the puzzle owed him money. A retired schoolteacher named Dot knitted the same green scarf for five months, and I suspect she unraveled it at home each week, like Penelope, because it never got longer. We didn't talk much, but we noticed each other's rituals and guarded them. Once a new volunteer tried to chat with Dot mid row and three of us glared in unison like a jury.
Round four was the bad one. My white count crashed, my mouth filled with sores, and my hair, which I had been pretending was only thinning, came out in the shower in a way I will not describe except to say I sat down on the tile and stayed there until the water went cold.
That night I couldn't remember the third line.
I lay in bed reaching for it and finding a smooth blank wall. You do not need to see... you do not need... you do not. I cried harder over that lost line than I had cried over the diagnosis, which tells you something about how the mind rations its collapses.
My sister found the anthology on the shelf the next morning to read the line back to me.
And here is where the floor of the story opens.
The poem wasn't there.
There was an E. Harlan in the book, that part was real, a slim, forgettable poem about a harbor. It contained the word rope once and the word dark once. There was no staircase of four lines. My sister and I went through the book page by page at the kitchen table, twice. We searched the internet until 1 a.m. We found nothing.
The verse I had recited two hundred times with poison running into my chest did not exist... anywhere outside of me. Somewhere in the sleepless dark before that first infusion I had taken a mediocre harbor poem, two lines of something half remembered, and a fear I couldn't say out loud, and I had welded them into the thing I needed.
I had written it.
Terrified, at 3 a.m., without permission, without noticing.
I laughed until the sores in my mouth hurt. Forty one years of telling everyone I was not creative, I just liked to read, and my own mind had been a poet the entire time, waiting for a night desperate enough to prove it.
I finished treatment in March. There is a brass bell by the nurses' station that you ring on your last day, and I had rehearsed being dignified about it, and instead I rang it like the building was on fire while Priya and Dot applauded and the crossword man gave me a solemn nod, one professional to another.
Afterward I did something that still surprises me. I went looking for E. Harlan, the real one, because I felt I owed a debt to the shoulder I had built my rope on. I found almost nothing, a schoolteacher from Ohio, two poems in defunct journals, dead in 1977. Nobody had heard of her, and reading about her sent me down a night of reading profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, all these voices waiting in the dark to be somebody's rope. It rearranged something in me. A poem does not need to be famous to save a life. It needs to be findable at 3 a.m. That is the entire job.
So I wrote mine down properly. All four lines, then, slowly, over months, the rest of the poem around them, the parking garage, the lemon magnet, Priya's rainbow laces. I workshopped it with a patience I never gave anything before, because I finally understood what it was for. Poems about hope get called soft by people who have never needed one. Let them. This spring, five years clear, I did the most frightened brave thing I have done since Chair 7: I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, my name attached, no hiding behind a dead schoolteacher from Ohio.
It didn't win. I keep meaning to mind.
Last month I had my annual scan, clean again, and on my way out I saw a woman alone in the parking garage, sitting in her car with the engine off, gripping the wheel, first day face. I know that face from mirrors. I didn't knock on her window... you don't knock on that window. But I went home and printed four lines on a card, laminated it at the library, and on my next visit I left it tucked into the taped armrest of Chair 7, where a certain kind of person, on a certain kind of Thursday, might find a rope already tied.
Hold what holds. The dark is wide.
It's yours now too.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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