ReLeaf, Relief

We asked for a  Japanese cherry,

a redbud, and a sugar maple.

The Friday before my surgery

is when they will arrive. Then Monday

is my lumpectomy. It’s Stage One, small,

and I’ll come home to the Japanese cherry

in our yard that same day.

And my children will be here. I’ll heal.

I was thirteen when I read about this surgery

and felt titillated. A woman’s worry

in “Tell Me, Doctor,” Mama’s Ladies’ Home Journal.

“Sposin’ that he says that your lips are like cherries,”

Ado Annie sings in “I Cain’t Say No.” To me it was a story,

like in Oklahoma, the bad girl in the musical

we played on our hi-fi stereo. The doctor mentioned surgery

and said a doctor should examine her breasts and to me

this was sex, Lady Chatterley’s breasts swinging “like bells.”

I knew people died when they were old. The Japanese cherry

and the other trees are part of “ReLeaf,” free trees

if you sign up early. I’ve been told that I’ll feel

relieved to get this behind me, the surgery,

which is what Dr. Goodrich C. Schauffler advises

in “Tell Me, Doctor” in 1962, when women had to feel

for the cancerous lumps and I sang “your lips are like cherries”

to the record player heartlessly, in Mississippi,

not thinking that the woman in that column, in “Tell

Me, Doctor,” probably would die. Surgeries

were worse. Jacqueline Susann had a double mastectomy,

but the model in her novel, Valley of the Dolls,

only knows how to take off her clothes. A  Japanese cherry

planted in our yard, a redbud and a sugar maple. These trees

won’t have cherries or maple syrup—they are ornamental,

as breasts seem until you hear you need to have surgery.

Sposin’, I sang, your lips are like cherries?