Incidental Finding – Vandal Poem of the Day

Over five years my surgical scar has cooled

to a pale fault line, the slow tectonics of healing,

but this morning the doctor again unscrolls an x-ray,

points to a ghostlike wisp, and repeats the word mass,

scarier even than the word shark or the word missing.

But not scarier than malignant, from malign, to speak evil of.

I hear it in the hiss through aspens as I wait for pathology,

barefoot on a balcony in a hospital gown and overcoat.

Siblings of ill children skate to the lake’s bull’s-eye

and lie on their stomachs with their ears pressed to the ice.

They listen for the groans and bone-cracks of a body

of water frozen to its core. And with the weight of pike fishers

and ptarmigans, a capsized canoe, and the kids’ warm breaths

forecasting an inevitable spring, the ice refuses, even then, to break.