The Hunza, from northwest Kashmir, are the only group
		of people known to be free of cancer.

1
After this coal town lost its jobs,
After anthracite packed and fled,
The entrepreneurs arrived, wrote
Hydroponics on their government grant
For gardeners and glass, low-interest
Revitalization loans. Now hundreds
Of greenhouses lie on the leveled slag,
Tomatoes going green to pink, half
A million madly swelling out of water
Inside this paradise for vandals.

2
The last coal has wound its way eastward,
Lost itself to barge and train. A mile
From the greenhouses a culm-bank rises
Higher than any hill in the county,
Sits sparse of growth like the cancer-scalp
Come home from treatment for the hot spots
In the body when they flare like mine fire,
Rumors of bankruptcy, default on loans.
And this evening I watched those houses
From my steel-blue car, parked by myself
Like a lure for entrapment waiting for
Lights, the lonely, or the Quasimodo
Look of the law. And when the darkness clung
To the stalks, when none of those choices
Came, I backed, turned, and crept to the highway
As if I’d thrown a body from my trunk.
3
How we rock-a-bye our children
Through inevitable daymares,
My daughter blood-tested last week
And winning her lottery with
The mono ticket, seven days
Asleep instead of clinic drives.
And surely she understands that
Cells default, a boy she’s danced with
Dying tonight a year after
Sitting for that needle. She’s heard
His odds, at least, quoted, because
He hadn’t mishandled canning,
Plutonium, or sex. She’s seen
Eulogy write itself despite
Diet, safeguards, desire’s control.
And after the doctors removed
His bone marrow, after they cleaned
And changed it to something he might
Live with, they put it back, and he
Brightened, then bloomed, then turned to husk.

4
Always, in the collective wish, there are parents
Reading the stories of the laying on of hands.
In this house, in those rooms, in that office their lips
Are moving to the rhythm of the faith-spun words
As if reading like children might ease the entrance
Of the Hunza dream. In the gospel of remissions
Is the prophecy of promise. In the gospel of cures
Is the hearsay miracle of the absent apostle.