Diagnostics

What do you do when maroon news finds you glinting
in that lovely light of just after dawn, when you discover

a weeping sore on your dog’s tail, shiny and ulcerous,
a raw wound vibrant in its crimson and vermilion and

scarlet and salmon and every other shade of color
that blossoms in the intricacies of a sore, and blood,

of course, blood red, too, and you wonder how we learned
to be disgusted by the body breaking through its skin

when such a complex consonance of hues would be
striking in any other context, carmine and burgundy

and cinnabar and rose, a patch of sunset, and you can’t
stop rolling her onto her side to get a better look, as if

this time you’ll see something new that might prove
wrong what you already know to be true, and

she looks so shy about it, or even ashamed, like
she knows what’s coming because part of her does,

because you don’t need a doctor or a human brain
to tell you how the story ends, and the vet won’t open

for twenty more minutes, for twelve more minutes,
for three more minutes, it opened six minutes ago,

it opened thirty-four minutes ago, and you’re waiting
by your phone as if they’ll call you first—What to do

when all your instincts beg you to make like a moth
at sunbreak, scrambling for the darkest crevice to enter

a dream-like state, but of course without the dreams
because they’d be gnarly and besides, you’re a goddamn

moth who can’t even dream and probably doesn’t
sleep and just waits unknowingly for death, lucky

enough that every best friend you could ever make
will outlive you, rather than the other way around;

how dreary things can get when malignance refuses
to be just a metaphor. I’ve heard it’s eugenicist to flatten

humanity into the easy simile of a tumor spreading
through the organs of the earth, an unthinking growth

that poisons the air and the water and the forest and the blood,
because when you start to compare humanity to cancer,

the same people are triaged for emergency surgery
over and over again: spreading, spreading. But how else

to express the way we’ve set the whole world on fire,
relentlessly? Even after chemo, we may yet outlast

the sable and the fawn and the coral and every other
shade of life that continues to make new life in this mirage

of a late world, and the butterfly, of course, the butterfly, too,
that boldly colored paragon of evolutionary innocence,

naïve summertime child of the sunshine, delicately
speciated into almost twenty thousand varieties, each

too beautiful for a land of soot and ruin. Or at least
that’s what the symbolism says, promising us beauty

won’t survive our collapse. I’ve run out of other ways
to describe how we’ve beleaguered ourselves

into a corner, scared ourselves into static, into nihilism,
into what’s one man to do, into we can’t afford

chemotherapy anyway because Emma’s just a dog
and we’ve already got enough credit card debt to last

until the next crisis that requires the service of a lazy analogue
to keep my mind off things. But I don’t sleep,

because it’s morning now or did you forget,
because I’m not moth or butterfly and it’s finally time

to make that phone call, an obligation that already feels old,
obsolete: what a dusty inconvenience looming death is—

like dropping the filter of your cigarette in the ash pile,
the taste of fate lingers. Their first opening is Monday,

at four in the afternoon. So I look at the tumor again,
and it’s big and scary and unyielding because I can see

I’m going to outlive her, because my shadow, my arrow,
my best friend has cancer and all I can do is write.