Breast Burl

After my first mammogram,

I go to Robert Frost’s New Hampshire farm

and stare at one of two remaining apple trees.

I cup a burl in my palm, like a breast.

My mother’s mastectomy scar was a jagged crevice  

like this—like bark.

“It’s just a baseline,” the mammographer said earlier,

as though apologizing for my age: 35.

She compressed my left breast on a plastic tray,

said, “Don’t breathe” and then:

“My mom died young, too.”

The camera clicked.

A pebble-sized lump formed in my mother’s

left breast when I was 13.

Eight years later, a metastasis and Hospice lanyards.

She was 53.

I, about to graduate from college and still green,

Felt left to decay with the cider apples.

 At the orchard, a decade later,

a robin pecks at melting snow as if to announce,

spring is here.

Spring is here.
The torchee of bird calls makes my chest ache.

“All cancer is born of sadness,” I once read.              

But the sky is the kind of blue that spins nature—

and grief—into art.

I hold the tree burl in one hand, my breast in the other,

and contemplate how,

exactly,

I would live if the radiologist called to say, “Come back.”