My mother’s pancreas must be tart
like a persimmon, with hard seeds
of regret for the islets, distributed
through the fleshy red undergrowth
of adolescence. They look like tomatoes,
their anatomy in the official depictions,
persimmons do, a bright package crowned
with a neat green stem, and if you cut off
the head of a pancreas, its body continues
to function, like a proverbial chicken with
reflexes not always coherently determined.
In my mother’s family, there have been
cancers of the brain, breast, bone, and
breath. This is not meant to be poetic,
but a tally of facts, the bequest of our
inheritance: We were slow learners.
The rush to change, to improve upon
every other generation should have been in
our religion, which instead was clannish,
old-growth, and philosophically adverse
in complexion. In pediatric cancers,
the answer is simple: turn off the childhood,
the need to multiply, divide, outlast and
stretch. A protocol much like my mother’s
Army brat upbringing: no milestones
or reunions, no diction to plan ahead.

My mother’s pancreas is the mother of
all her organs, allowing them to feed,
like a mother hen ministers to her chicks:
hunting, dipping, diving, pecking, into
guileless pink gullets, a harvest of need,
a horn of want. Organs feed in a warrantless
repetition that somehow prefigures them,
just as my mother skipped the experience
of her own mother, a victim of scarlet fever
who spent her adult life in convalescence.
She was lonely as the other grannies bustled
about lunch boxes and marmalades, the hot
waters for their husbands’ shaves and baths.
How much kinder and cooperative were her
sweet sweet dears, with their stoicism and
shade-casting patience: African Violets and
Creeping Charlottes, indestructible houseplants.

There’s a game my mother plays with my
daughter involving old ladies on the shore,
their skin webbed and flaccid, their regrets
plucked of muscle and buoyancy clear through
to their swimming gear. “Chickens on the beach,’’
my mother announces, and they count but do not
comment on coops and chicken houses: many
the site of a downy slaughter. When Macduff
lost all his little chickens, he rightly imagined
where they had disappeared. At night,
chicken-ladies beat it back to their vacation
homes, their daydreams of their younger thighs
and necks, and perhaps they cry with the fury
of electrical poles forced to feed the special
senior citizen’s trolley, or neurons feeding
one another after death. For cancers of the brain
there are such grand quantifications: minute
astronomical shapes, like pieces of candy:
sticky-smart and cantilevered. For the pancreas
there is no such ceremony, only stages, and assaults
of numbers: cycle and degree, post-, pre- and peri-,
a chant my daughter will emulate without understanding,
like call and song offered against a dome of spirits
that decided such things before her birth: turned
against chickens and her grandmother.