All Of A Sudden

ALL OF A SUDDEN
by Hugh Fox
I throw the news out on to my Contact  List,
120 contacts, some of them in the  morgue
for years, “My oncologist just told  me that
I’ve got a maximum of 2 years to live with
my prostate cancer, no known cures to make
me last longer…,” and all of a sudden…there’s
Fanny Winward on Long Island, kind of a combo
of Dietrich and Cochinelle, 20 years  of silence
since I wrote a book in which I told the truth-
truth-truth about her when the sun went down
and her aged husband went to sleep, now pictures
of aging but still ecstatic her, her kids, grandkids,
a few poems  about  lilacs and  legs, sundown,
funup,  then Rich Dunthrope out in San Francisco,
10 films based on his  novels, old, bored, kind
of semi-paralyzed, a couple  strokes, “So fight
back, chemo-everythings, look at  me, the
hospital’s a battlefield,” my long-lost-pissed-off
daughter Gabrielle in Tokyo (teaching English),
mad since I walked out of her Japanese mother
20 years ago, “Come over here, Dad, you never
know what they might come up with!,” all the
old  poets, ex-lovers, friends from grammar
school, high school, college, teaching-mates
at the forty colleges I  taught at, my alone-
time house suddenly cyberneticized into
the Old Days in Berkeley, Brooklyn, Cambridge,
Beat-wild-Rebel-Hippy-Drippy-