Last night, at dusk, standing in Central Park, I met an old friend who spotted me because of my dog. It was beautiful. There were horses, my wife Connie holding my dog by the leash and I was turning toward them, having thrown away a bag of poop–for such is my life– and Andre who is admiring my dog looks up and calls my name. A magic moment, cosmic circus, all made possible by a guide dog. I hadn’t seen Andre for 18 years.

If wings, if weather, if the cloudy dead

If potent as scripture

If lit like a match

If & if & the wall of forest

& the blue of sky

& if you come home

& if then, what we say

As if there was no if

If, a black candle we carry to bed

& so again you believe you’re the only one. In a crowd you’re so lonesome you hear the sounds at the edges, the dead leaves, the spokes of a passing bicycle. & to each person you pass you say: “I don’t know you, you are so lucky.” & of course you don’t really say it. Deep inside you are planning your minor renaissance like Marcel Duchamp who made his own rules for chess. Your game will involve a guitar with no strings.

I eat what they put in front of me. I am a terravore, I will eat the world.  

I feel shame because lately I’ve been eating irrecoverable rhythms. 

Last night I ate the superstitions of sunset. 

Inside, these old troublemakers fall in the bottomless echo of poverty, a fancy way of saying my guts.

You just think you are sizing up your destiny Mr. K. It’s time now to eat and realize falsity. 

In the manner of poems we always said that dawn was universal, strictly collective, a trembling presentiment.  

Everyone must love or hate sunrise equally. (Here comes old Berkeley declaring light an operation of the mind. & so it has been…)

What I mean is daybreak, as we conceive it, is based on prior speculations. 

There it was, twining itself with the river. 

Among leaves we felt an unwearied immortality. One always did. I always did. & all we had to do was open our eyes. 

Sunlight, like ourselves, has been reliable since the first morning of childhood.

Oh but daybreak sails cruel. One summer morning, early, it says you are an implacable exile as you walk beside a wall. 

Another day it hits you with customary shards–hard vegetation, the rubbish of dreams. 

Sunlight, despoiled, unbeautiful, hardly magical anymore. The trauma of adolescence. The private language of rusting things.

So it was always a life’s work to see in sunrise many terrains at once.  

See how the sky flows into the broken houses. 

We have received the following press release. Good work from the American Action Fund: 

Baltimore, Maryland (February 28, 2012): The American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults (AAF) is making its free Braille books for blind children available online as downloadable BRF files.  Since 1997, the AAF has provided popular and award-winning children’s books, including titles from popular series, to blind children throughout the United States as well as to libraries and other organizations that serve blind children. The books have been and will continue to be distributed by mail, but now readers and libraries will also be able to download them from the American Action Fund Web site. The BRF files are ready to be used on Braille notetakers and other Braille-aware devices.

Barbara Loos, president of the American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults, said: “The American Action Fund is pleased to make our free Braille books for blind children available on the Internet. Technology is making Braille more widely available than ever before, and we are proud to become part of this exciting trend.”

Dr. Marc Maurer, AAF executive director, said: “Braille literacy is one of the highest predictors of success in later life for blind students, so we want to do everything in our power to ensure that blind children have free and easy access to Braille books.  This initiative will set blind children on a path to achievement and independence—not to mention giving them the simple joy of reading a good book.”

I feel the old sadness in my eyes, like the forefront of sleep. I am a boy again, the one who was bullied at school, who felt daily the enforced and jagged shame of blindness. The gears turned in the clock like cruel instruments reserved only for the lost. And at the windows a darkness of unreserved memories and rain.

By Andrea Scarpino 

The body—sick versus well. Normal versus abnormal. That’s how we tend to think, isn’t it?

But my Mayo Clinic doctors say I am perfectly healthy. Every test looks “normal,” my hormone levels fall within “normal” ranges—even my Thalassemia blood is normal-for-me. And yet, pain. Most months, sometimes month after month continuously, pain in my breasts. My diagnosis: cyclical mastalgia, at the “severe end of the spectrum.”

But the working theories of mastalgia all point to hormonal imbalance—and I don’t have that. My doctors say it’s clear my issues are “hormone mediated” but they are also clear they don’t know what that really means. “We’re working in a gray zone when we work with hormonal levels,” my breast clinic specialist said. And later, “We have no understanding of that yet.”

So, the best they have to offer me: continuous birth control for another three months, topical pain medication, diet change, and a course in mindfulness training. I’ll go back in June and we’ll re-evaluate.

Some frustrations: every doctor seems to want to try every course of treatment anew, under their own watchful eye. The fact that I’ve already tried continuous birth control and diet changes doesn’t matter—I didn’t try either with the advice of Mayo doctors.

And the “What’s another three months?” attitude. As in the gynecologist: “You’ve been in pain so long, what’s another three months?” Which says to me: you don’t know pain. And to which I replied, “Every doctor says ‘three months’ and it’s now been 20 years.’”

Some moments of loveliness: conversations—real, open, honest. After my first breast clinic meeting, I felt—well, crushed. I had hoped—despite myself—for a “Yes, we see this all the time and know just what to do.” And that didn’t happen—no one sees this all the time. No one has a ready cure. But my doctor called the next day and we talked—and she listened and we talked some more. No doctor has ever done that, spent an hour on the phone trying to help me understand her thinking, trying to understand my own. And at our exit appointment, again, her kind attention. Another hour of conversation.

And in the halls, a piano. People stopped randomly and played, sang songs. A woman with a guitar, a man playing jazz. And everyone I met—ultrasound technician, the woman who drew my blood—was kind, patient, treated me with concern. 

So there was loveliness within the frustration—or frustration within the loveliness. Like everything, I guess. And I know at least that I need to shift my thinking to pain management, acceptance of a chronic condition. I need to think about coping with this for another 20 years. Or longer—as long as I live. Which isn’t what I was hoping for, but seems to be the closest thing to an answer: normalcy within an abnormal condition. Wellness within pain. 

Poet and essayist Andrea Scarpino is a frequent contributor to POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

–thinking of Andre Breton

World’s name. Stillness.

Sky water life all

Same.

Alone one finds

There’s not enough…

We want to buy the museum of night.

**

Clear windows,

Dark apples,

Life’s small darknesses

Infecting

Book after book

What becomes of us

Who have this inkling of something?

Rick Santorum says President Obama is a “snob” for encouraging Americans to go to college. In a nation where only 30% of the population has a bachelor’s degree, the President’s aspiration for the American people is more than a liberal fantasy, it’s a necessary ambition for this country in a new and competitive century. I make my living by teaching in a university and according to Santorum that makes me a snob by association. I believe that education is the single best tool for advancement. If you parse Santorum’s assertion he’s really saying just what the GOP has been working on for over twenty years: the middle class should just lie down and die and the poor should stay poor. Poor Santorum: he hates the work ethic along with gay people, women, and Jeffersonian democracy. Of course the definition of a snob is someone who believes his tastes are superior to those of other people, which makes Santorum an ignorance snob.