Cancer Eclipsed

Yes, there is the disease and I’ve heard it said that if one lives long enough they will eventually develop some kind of cancer: breast, prostate or the liver-spots of hand and face turned to skin cancer, the farmers who lose the upper half of their drivers-side ear, or once red-heads, the small-balled tip of their lovely ski-jump noses.

Holes in the Ozone—it seems here on the coast that there might be a tear directly above us. I imagine it there in the sky, a flap of waving, see-through film not detected by the naked eye because of the white-blue fire seeping in, radared rays of sun like the concentrated beam that starts a crustacean’s hard shell aflame when focused through a magnifying glass.

Nearly a full eclipse of the sun just last August and we’d made the cereal box viewers, the neighbors joining us to beam reflections from binoculars onto white sheets. Heather let me know that she was a Cancer, had just had her birthday, and I made a mental note that her and Dan, long-time married since their teen years were a good astrological match, felt the ping-pong of my own heart as the moon shadow cast over the glowing orb made the temperature drop, fast. My missing in action, a cancer too, both of us watery creatures, but he’d been found out, full-mooned, with a sun-ruled Leo, and had since retracted, a nervy crab into his shell.