“The Path, Illuminated”

by Jessica Rowe

(a path is a track laid down by continual treading)

when they imaged her body, we saw the tracks of the first surgery –

staples and scar tissue at intervals –

magnified – as though

a phosphorescent locomotive

had laid a path

through the center of the motherland

I still wake and I ache in my love for those scars

the unseen, the unsaid, the missing –

this record altered by memory, and

I could not stop looking at it, backlit on the wall in front of us

there it stood, the bone house, knit in marrow

by the women before it – this country

of mothers tatting skeletal lace to hold

the breath of someone who had not yet learned to

rib-rattle, to seed pod,

the milkweed of her passing yet unblown

On the phone, the oncologist described the cancer as spreading in a dandelion pattern

and that is how they learned what to name it

it fanned in circular ripples

to throw root

in lungs, in

gut, in

the empty space

where once the tiny loom of her uterus had weaved the skeletal silk of us

so many years prior – breathtaking

– no – literally breath taking

it wanted to grow

like stubborn, shaggy flowers in the glowing lawn ofher body

the tumors popped and sparkled

in constellations, radiant

in wheeling stars

illuminating (a path) in the deep night

of her (once) secret (now) central station of self

I tried to find a pattern in it, but the scope of it dazzled me,

and I could not track the roots

tangling in threads around intestine

treading concentric under the new furrows

that had (just yesterday) been flesh-cut to join the continuum

it looked like taproots following a buried

sprinkler line, it looked

like star scars in a celestial heaven

held in a boreal cathedral of ribs

a cartilage continent, conifered and vaulted,

where life and its choices

of constant calcium, a track insistent

had been written

here, a brighter white line

stitched in filaments

(laid down by continual treading)

a path of persistence over the repeated

pop of bone branch from sternum –

this, the ghost-gift of pregnancies past

where, en utero, my sister

had grown large enough to push

back against the canopy of branches above her,

to displace the chandelier and set it swinging,

to still, to thread, to catch, to heal,

then – to snap – slipping suddenly

loose again

at a subsequent sibling

a harvest of habit, a hitchnow creaking achingly into memory

summoned by cough or laugh,

followed by sharp intake

of breath, a hand

clapped protectively under

right breast, cheeks reddening like a robin,

so that’s what it looks like – experience

– (insistent) – a life

running bright under the white

of the lights like blood

under the snow. I shake

my head back into the present, images

of glowing bones rattling their ivory dice in the cup of my skull

how could I have planted all of that under the soil?

where

could I have sent her but back to her garden –

to plant her like seeds, and wish that I could believe that something would come of it?