Walk and listen.
I follow a creek.
Blackbirds rattle and click in a dead elm.
In the trees I find a pile of discarded birch logs.
I listen as mud wasps fly in and out of their nest.
They sound like old people in a dispute. Buzzing in their different pitches.
They sound like the old Finns in my grandmother’s church.
Sober. Hard at work. Talking beneath their breath. Working while others are napping. A
little resentful.
Some are fast as b’b’s from a gun. Some are sluggish.
I follow the creek and wade through shallow pools among cat
tails.
Bullfrogs talk like the gods of mud.
**
“He’s spending too much time alone,” my Aunt Muriel says in her shrill voice. She has
two voices. One is scarcely audible, her lips moving a catacomb voice as my mother calls it.
The other is like a cry across a public square.
“He’s going to grow up weird!” Muriel shouts.
They are below me in the kitchen. I can hear them through a heat register.
“For Chrissakes Muriel he’s blind!” my mother shouts. “The kid can’t play baseball!”
Planet of the Blind 