Do You Love An Apple?
by Lori Dixon
Do you love an apple? Do you love a pear? Do you love a laddie with shiny blond hair? Oh, yes, I love him, I can't deny him, I will be with him wherever he goes.
Four days before surgery and my cancer has three victims. This warm window sill where I sit and my husband can't look at me I watch the air impossibly clear, the sun too bright the world that will spin on nor pause for personal loss and my son swaying
in a shaft of sunlight to a song oh yes I love him, I can?t deny him and he cannot know cannot know now that when he is grown I may be to him the dimmest of memories. When the beast in my blood is done with my body this child whose hair crowns my dreams and whose touch can crack my heart will live on to sing in this world that spins too bright too cruel
Do you love an apple? Do you love a pear? Do you love a laddie with shiny blond hair? Oh, yes, I love him, I can't deny him, I will be with him wherever he goes.
This child who drew milk from my breast -- watching him dance in daylight, play at playing a mouth-harp, sway to the song he loves. In four days the breast he grew on will be excised, rendered down to slide samples and pathology reports. If I had known the last time he slipped from my nipple and sighed to sleep there were no vessel large enough to measure my mourning.
Do you love an apple? Do you love a pear? and I love the tree whose sharp silhouette stands against the sky pale bark on clear blue air it gives my eye a focus that is not my child in sunlight nor my husband across the room where he sees sun on my hair and blinks back tears I do love clear mornings like this and the cruel endless world that kindly has given this moment forever frozen as time skips a heartbeat and my son swaying like a willow to a rhythm that marks our waiting
For I love an apple. And I love a pear. And I love a laddie with shiny blond hair. Oh, yes, I love him, I can't deny him. I want to be with him wherever he goes.
A published poet just out of college, Lori Dixon, eventually got her PhD as a medievalist, but was diagnosed with breast cancer while writing her dissertation. She went on and finished, but eventually went to work as a computer analyst at James Madison University, and worked through her first recurrence and subsequent stem cell transplant in 1999. With her second recurrence, she retired and returned to her love of writing novels and poetry. She wishes readers to know that she has been alive and stable on herceptin and xeloda for the past seven and a half years.