At dusk the lights in the country houses were yellow as the eyes of lions. My mother was the last empress of Russia, doomed and captive in her palace, and she moved from mirror to mirror striking poses of tragic beauty.
Outside in the darkness cars roared past, and maybe a driver saw those glittering windows beyond the oaks and thought to himself, “there’s a lovely house, how happy they must be,” not sensing my mother was there, sewing her up her dress with a diamond sliver.
Occasionally I break my heart on daylight–do you know how that goes?
A wishful half-mind desire for my parents, my personal ghosts, old friends
Gone, comes like a minnow’s glint and so easily, it was just a walk
Under trees and then, blue bottle there’s my mother, blue as always
Still wrapped in her life–she too seeing colors, nursing grievances
As she did in life. Blue as a cricket’s back, blue as old bindings
In the library of lonely childhood. Daylight, what have you done?
The streets shed their light, like strange movies. Corky and I walked around New York like actors in a technicolor pageant, sweetly in tandem. Walk, walk fast, sing. Our lives were going to be a kind of logorhythmic performance. How do you become a guide dog team? You dance and sing the darkness and light, make it do your bidding.
Back at the guide dog school they would say in class, “follow your dog” which, in the early days of training meant that you shouldn’t lag back or drag your feet. Follow your dog meant trust her. Go with her. Let her make decisions. On the first day of class at Guiding Eyes I remember a student saying to me, “Man that felt like I was walking on an airplane wing.” He meant that it felt both light and dangerous. It would take him more than a few ways to turn over to his dog’s steadfast intelligence and follow her freely. Once you follow a dog you really are in a dance. Fred Astaire said: “Dancing is a sweat job.” He also said: “I just put my feet in the air and move them around.” Dancing is hard work until the music gets inside you.
On that same first day Corky and I descended under the streets into the subway. I stopped with the “Mairzy Doats” and just talked to gently to her. A little baritonal whispering. “My dear Girl, we are in the new darkness, and it’s going to be okay. What a good good Girl you are!” We were floating then.
How do you become a guide dog team? First there’s a month of classes, lectures, and training walks. But if you’re a serious guide dog user you sing to your dog. It doesn’t matter what you sing. It could be “Mairzy Doats” or “Yellow Submarine”. On my first solo walk with Corky in New York City, squeezing through the half assed construction sites and rude throngs I sang softly:
Mairzy doats and dozy doats
And liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too,
Wouldn’t you?
If the words sound queer and funny to your ear,
A little bit jumbled and jivey,
Sing “Mares eat oats and does eat oats
And little lambs eat ivy.”
Oh mairzy doats and dozy doats
And liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too,
Wouldn’t you?
Leadbelly on the hifi–
Good morning blues
Clean nowhere in mind–death after death
And all before breakfast. Didn’t I love enough Lord
To have an ounce of hope? The old singer had
Grasshoppers in his pillow, crickets in
His milk. One drinks his hope that way
Eh Meester Jesus? Just push the bugs around
With your tongue.
Now a team we had to learn how to talk to each other. Pet owners think you talk to dogs like they’re small humans. And in truth dogs do like to be praised. But when a dog is your team mate you talk to her in a different way. This talking is an acquired art; a whole body art. In an odd way, this communication between blind handler and guide dog is akin to what some of my autistic friends have experienced. Words are visceral, tremble in air, have colors in your mind, are influenced by instincts. I thought “left” and Corky turned left and I never said the word. Did I turn ever so slightly? Was my girl able to detect the slightest postural shift in me? Maybe? Maybe. But sometimes there was no shift at all. I practiced this. I thought left and made no apparent movement and Corky without a hitch, smooth as an automatic transmission, shifted. We were talking with our respective nervous systems. Even now, ten years after her passing we are still talking. I don’t feel the need to explain this. You’ll have to trust me about the matter. Left.
I’ve been thinking a lot about team work lately. When I was a child they wouldn’t let me play sports owing to my blindness. This made sense when the only games for kids were baseball and basketball. But somehow the physical education instructors believed it would be good for me to sit on the sidelines and so I’d daydream to the sounds of sneakers on wood floors or the vaguely pastoral whispers of baseball. I did a lot of daydreaming. It was easy because no one talked to me. Talking was reserved for those who were in the game and I was for all intents and purposes in Valhalla. The truth is I never had a team experience, never had camaraderie, reliance, the sense that somehow someone had my back. Never had someone who made me better because he or she was there. This quality of unsporting isolation in childhood was the most painful thing about being blind. When I recollect the isolation and enforced solitudes of boyhood I see how my first guide dog not only gave me confidence in traffic–she also gave me the first sense of being on a team. We might only have been a team of two, but we were a powerful and mobile team and yes, we had each other’s backs. Corky dog brought me this spirited physical and emotional bond that had always been missing from my life. Dogs are teamsters through and through.
Everyone knows that in a team sport you can’t win without others. I saw this for the first time when Corky and I were crossing Columbus Circle in Manhattan. From a traffic standpoint the area is a nightmare. It’s a lethal circus of combined avenues and cross streets, the traffic moving so fast it makes a zithing sound. We plunged together into the maelstrom with her good judgment and my faith in her. I once tried to describe the moment when we left the sidewalk’s safety there on the upper westside of Manhattan as embracing the emptiness between stars. Now that’s teamwork. “Who is your team mate?” “Blaise Pascal.”
When my father sang small birds passed out. The man, as they say, had a tin ear. But his joy was marvelous and the dogs loved his shenanigans. I can still see him now, making the crockery jump.
Here in the mountains where the birds shiver
And across the lake a woman beats a rock
With an oar and clouds rear up like horses
I take pleasure in the absurd life inside us.
I remember you lived on “big ditch road”
A homely name–O home sweet home–
Let’s climb down into the hole of domesticity,
Women and children first, books and dishes,
Maybe a set of knives and a radio.
I want to be a liaison of sorts to the court of things,
A poet’s job, sorting the leftovers,
Making the emptiness sing.
I don’t know how to say goodbye
But I can play my harmonica in the dirty places
Like any man inside a man.
Little dog’s tail is like a spaghetti floor mop, upright and waving as we walk the circle in our neighborhood. Silly guy! Perfect!
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Planet of the Blind 