Poetry – Page 21 – Planet of the Blind

I walk with a guide dog for the blind most of the time. Some days I travel without him. I tap the pavement with a long white stick.

Once, in Dublin, Ireland, I worked my way through the long airport and swept my cane before me and a woman grabbed me by the arm without warning.

"Where do you want to go?" she asked. She was wearing serious perfume.

"I want to go to Paris," I said.

"Oh," she said, "that’s where I am going!"

"Ah," I said, "but I don’t want to go to Paris today."

"Why not?" she asked. She was still clutching my arm.

"Because Paris is the city for restlessness," I said, "and I am not restless."

We were standing in a crowded Irish airport and for a moment we were perfectly still.

"Today," I said, "I am headed for the sea where I will become actual, sharing the form of motion."

She let me go and walked away, lost in her own body of thought.

s.K.

If you visit Lance Mannion’s blog you’ll see that Mr. Mannion has placed me in the company of the poet Tom Lux in the "personal poetry preference" department. I am all agog and aquiver because I adore the poems of Tom Lux and I’m just sufficiently a kid-minstrel that I am unabashedly giddy with beanie rotating pleasure at being handed such a fine paper flower.

I am posting a poem I wrote about western New York State, a place that Lance Mannion knows well:

The Jazz From Cripple City

I saw tonight four men in wheelchairs eating

Flowers And laughing through the dusk

While in the public gardens

Forsythia leaned to the water.

O to bear up under such rollicking measures…
O to live in Baffalo, New York and eat civic plantings…

Yes I wasn’t alone before this poem began:

Yes, it’s true, I can’t see a thing.

A friend had to tell me about the men who ate from the rhododendrons.

Her description was full of detail, let us say, as

The courts are full of law,