Without. This is a poem that I began to write during Jane's leukemia, in the present tense, describing the landscape of leukemia we were living through. But when I came to assemble the book of poems about her death, Without, it became obvious that it would be best at the moment of her death, and I put it in the past tense, and changed a word or two here and there.

Without

we lived in a small island stone nation

without color under gray clouds and wind

distant the unlimited ocean acute

lymphoblastic leukemia without seagulls

or palm trees without vegetation

or animal life only barnacles and lead

colored moss that darkened when months did

hours days weeks months weeks days hours

the year endured without punctuation

February without ice winter sleet

snow melted recovered but nothing

without thaw although cold streams hurtled

no snowdrop or crocus rose no yellow

no red leaves of maple without October

no spring no summer no autumn no winter

no rain no peony thunder no woodthrush

the book was a thousand pages without commas

without mice oak leaves windstorms

no castles no plazas no flags no parrots

without carnival or the procession of relics

intolerable without brackets or colons

silence without color sound without smell

without apples without pork to rupture gnash

unpunctuated without churches uninterrupted

no orioles ginger noses no opera no

without fingers daffodils cheekbones

the body was a nation a tribe dug into stone

assaulted white blood broken to shards

provinces invaded bombed shot shelled

artillery sniper fire helicopter gunship

grenade burning murder landmine starvation

the ceasefire lasted forty-eight hours

then a shell exploded in a market

pain vomit neuropathy morphine nightmare

confusion the rack terror

vincristine ara-c cytoxan vp-16

loss of memory loss of language losses

pneumocystis carinii pneumonia bactrim

foamless unmitigated sea without sea

delirium whipmarks of petechiae

multiple blisters of herpes zoster

and how are you doing today I am doing

one afternoon say the sun came out

moss took on greenishness leaves fell

the market opened a loaf of bread a sparrow

a bony dog wandered back sniffing a lath

it might be possible to take up a pencil

unwritten stanzas taken up and touched

beautiful terrible sentences unuttered

the sea unrelenting wave grey the sea

flotsam without islands broken crates

block after block the same house the mall

no cathedral no hobo jungle the same women

and men they longed to drink hayfields no

without dog or semicolon or village square

without monkey or lily without garlic