They see me walking with my stick
And like a sway of curtains
I hear the assumptions—
That I’ve been admitted by mistake
Or must be lost
Surely poems require sight?
Screw Homer; who reads Milton?
Big time poets know blindness
Stands for something something—
Didn’t Rilke touch on it—
A blind man lead by a gray woman
And lost forever in infancies?
That blind girl who writes verses—
She must be a bird
Something something
Half related to language
Her poems like feathers
Or yarrow stalks.
“How do you write so clearly
If you can’t see?”
“How do you read?”
“Would you have been a writer
If you had sight?”
“Can you see me at all?”
Planet of the Blind 