Now it’s time for becoming old. In late September our living stands still. One sees maple trees turning in shock.
Deep in these first cold nights dreams throw impatient scenes in ye olde skull.
**
I wake early and walk in a gentle rain. Laugh. Thinking of Hegel. “Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.” A good life. And how good my shoes feel.
Hegel: “History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.” My blank-page old man shoes. A good life. Water in a cup.
**
Dasein you can have my old checkers set.
**
Out on the open ground. When did my hands grow all these dark spots? They’re like playthings from childhood that return to accuse us…
**
One often thinks
What’s a day for?
What are the likes of which?
Hands, old or young
Opened or closed
Are not the answer,
Another life
Is not the answer,
The strawberry is not the answer.
**
Dark pictures on the water,
Time to hang them up for winter.
**
Still lonely.
**
The day draws to a close and I feel the losses of boyhood, the boy who was sent away, too blind for games, too blind for school. This is why the furniture grows heavy as the light disappears. This is why the trees stand like cold giants.
**
At five I sat alone in the woods. Our neighbor–a lawyer whose house was behind a stockade–went to the fields with a gun and a flock of children. He was going to display adult heroism by shooting snakes. I asked if I could come but he said my blindness would prevent it. When he was gone the children taunted me:
"You can't come because you're blind!"
"Yeah, you might get hurt!"
A pine cone hit me in the chest.
"Look! He didn't even see that coming!"
"A snake might bite him!"
Then they vanished.
Some nights in the cold I start to fly.
I mean it. I’m cast off and nameless.
Planet of the Blind 