At Last Count

The cells multiply, coagulate, assemble

in lumps and masses, demand to be counted.

My doctors speak in centimeters and percentages,

then soften into metaphors. They sidle forward measuring

the quality of a life, pausing to leave gaps, blanks

that I am to fill in: “Wife. Mother. A teenage daughter.”

Things I am too stunned to remember, I send electronically, trying to transmit

my essence in the body of an email: poet, Appalachian girl, beekeeper.

Reply. Send. Forward. I spend days wondering how long the cells

have been amassing, signaling from below.  I silently recount

any detail that might be – or might ever have been

significant: exposures, traumas, pangs and twinges.

I begin to catalogue everything I can remember:  the color of rooms

in houses where I have lived, the voice of my father’s guitar.

I crawl the crest of time gathering up all that matters, recording every

twig and murmur, a furious attempt to outpace the replication of cells.