To Telling My Best Friend Two Weeks After Diagnosis Day
—July 2nd, 2024
About this sledge
I must swing, now,
I don’t want
to tell you.
I don’t want to be
that heavy ink spilling across
your Saturday toast
and jam, but my wife
has rightly nudged
me to open the lids
of my feelings wider.
You know I’d rather go
on cementing cinderblocks
around myself
which is just a meandering
way to say that I prefer
silence. You know the kind
of octopus under a rock
I am, so I wonder how you
will receive this news,
of today, this new weakness
shared between two men
that I wept in the shower
for eight minutes
as Marcus King, on repeat,
through all that steam
sang Goodbye Carolina,
sang goodbye to every other
better endocrine system
I could’ve had before today
but didn’t. So goodbye
vodka-sodas and soft sour
apple licorice ropes. Goodbye
rice. My stomach will be
a wooden doll stuck with needles
now. I can already hear (I know)
the discomforting sound of me
feeling sorry for myself, the sound
of waiting room ceiling fans,
and waxed paper seats,
and stethoscopes, and medical journals,
and I envy today’s teenagers
their ability to say,
so freely, how they’ve been
hurt, to be so certain, to say what
I seem only able to tell
the drain but keep trying
to tell you now. This morning,
down on my bare knees
and naked—a blur of slick limbs—
how easy it was to cry
when I was already
covered by water, that inhuman
kinship. So, old friend,
another year, too, has orbited
down, nearly invisible,
has fucked me up good,
and I can feel everyone
I’ve ever loved sliding
further and further toward
whatever it is we call
those relationships that time
eventually mortars down
to nothing-ness, like the wind
beheading sand dunes
into the ocean, forever
and endless. How can so much
that mattered so deeply
become so forgettable?
Have you ever been
as obsessed as I am
with trying to name
what is most meaningful?
A blackberry. A slice of sunlight.
My eyesight. Can you see
how I’ve sequestered myself
so long in South Carolina
that I’d rather moan my secrets
against four tile walls
and a dark song
than to your familiar ears,
old friend? Can you see how I fear
these ugly predicaments
of personhood, how I worry
about the weight
my telling of such
a secret may have on
you, the sunken piano of me
smashing through your ceiling,
the leaking piano of me
belly up on your new floors?
The piano will have to stop
feeling so annoyingly sorry
for itself, to stand up and call
the nurses’ desks, of course,
and make the appointments,
and I will, and I know
I can persist (I’m serious),
but, old friend, what an imposition
to have someone else’s (my)
jagged plumbing dumping
into your living room.
And that’s my fear
(perhaps unfounded?),
but there it is before us.
It exists, and I’m not asking
what tools you could provide
to right a life that will
never again be normal
as much as
I’m asking for you
to allow me, for a moment,
to make you very uncomfortable,
though I understand, now,
in middle age that anything
I’ll ever ask of you,
or any other human
being is unfair. Old friend,
I also know (of course) that
this diagnosis will never mean
as much to you, or anyone,
as it does to me, and it shouldn’t,
but I need you to hear it.
I need to hear myself say it
out loud because what matters
to me is becoming the kind
of man who can say—
more easily and to any person
he claims to love—
what has been demolishing him.
So you are that person
I need to think of me
whenever you can. So I have
Type-1 Diabetes. So I don’t know how
or why I am so afraid,
but these empty rooms
in my home and these boxes
of medicine opening
and emptying themselves
all over everything
will no longer do.
I love you. I’m sorry
for invading the rest
of your weekend
with this, my newest accident.
I’m sorry for making this
friendship—which is
my most monumental privilege—
and your life, for the length
of this conversation, even more difficult.
Ode to One Memory Which Might Be the Best Pharmacy in America
the first man awake and walking in camp
receives all to himself the magnitude
of this boundless quiet
so you must stand here awhile
at the edge of this high-mountain Montana pond at dawn
and do nothing but look at it
this misshapen frame for all that blue overhead to slow-drift clouds through
and though your first inclination will be to talk to it
the way you always feel the need to fill any silence with yourself
say nothing yawning with your arms held over your head
let all expectations empty from your fingertips
and listen to this place exist
listen to time impressing nothing upon it
and so resist also the poem’s proclivity toward conflict
your immune system cannot be
murdering your pancreas in the future yet
what future ignore the math
it is too soon to rattle the coals back together to start the coffee
too soon for anything made by a man’s hands
resist the symbolic
remember this water before you is not a reflection of you
the scent of ash left over from last night’s bonfire
is innuendo enough that humans have been here
so forget for now your two friends sleeping
still as pine cones behind you in their camo tent
let them be as they are a part of the landscape even in their dreams
as silent as young men stalking learned fish
let the moose small and far-off and bent with its antlers down into the water
be only what it is
resist the urge to turn meditative
you will not hack this experience into a lesson on a board
so erase the chalk dust of your intellect from this scene
the same way the glaciers
erasing themselves from this place gave form to this valley
unzip your jeans
let the air as delicate as cotton balls whisper
across each hair on your bare thighs
unzip your feelings too
as you enter the clear water slow and losing one toe at a time
the sun is lazily edging up and spilling over the cathedral walls now
filling this ice cream bowl of rock and soil and pond below
with something holy something natural
why not call it earth’s perfect grace awakening
this water lightening which accepts you naked
and does not ask of you whose face is this
as you paddle this blurring of limbs somewhere near the middle
someone who used to be you is
suspended golden face-up
in this liquid morning light ascending
someone whose body disappearing has now become some clouds
now become some sky
is floating here inhuman
outside of sickness and time
Ephraim Scott Sommers is a Type-1 Diabetic and the author of two books: Someone You Love Is Still Alive (2019) and The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire (2017). Currently, he lives in Rock Hill, South Carolina and is an Associate Professor of English at Winthrop University. He is also an actively touring singer-songwriter. For music and poems, please visit: www.ephraimscottsommers.com