Big poem mates with little poem:

They produce a lyric essay

A child

Hidden

Subsequently

In an Irish laundry.

The academy

Fears

Deformed children.

 

 

Sadness has me like a gavotte—

Music slowing

Not without intention

Which is God

In blood.

I understand.

Maybe

I’ve another

Few years

With this

Living face.

This morning

My neighbor

Lonely

Returned books

He’d borrowed

Deep last winter.

 

I am walking in circles. I erase this sentence. It’s better to be clever. Perhaps I should bring a talking animal into this? You see I didn’t erase it. You see how convoluted narration—any—really is? My mother died today, or was it yesterday? It doesn’t matter, the old country is dead.

Bring on the talking crow. Or the hundred year old monk I met in the sauna whose sweat smelled of strawberries. The sighs of a centenary holy man—who was celebrating his birthday in a steam bath, they are ‘of or pertaining to’ the talking animal. I left that sauna wiser.

I’d no language for the matter. Time wasn’t reliable. My Merleau-Ponty wristwatch had stopped. One wished to be shrewd, but it didn’t matter because there, mid-summer, beside a monastery, time had stopped.

I write poetry, a foolishness

Much like thinking

The heart

Has an Edenic flavor—

Continue my mistake

In these times.

I’m an old, mad, blind, despised,

And dying king alright.

Fine saying so.

When I was very small

My father bought me

A kite and you can imagine

That sightless child

Holding a string.

 

It is cold in the churches of my childhood. Mythology works this way. It will always be cold there, which is of course “here” insofar as my life is a place, insofar as any place will forever be a co-efficient of my consciousness. But then you see, it’s possible to walk over a patch of ground, your feet like dowsing sticks, and feel the chill of long buried churches—the spot, customary, nothing remarkable, maybe the tarmac of a gasoline station.

I’ve this blog about disability, about poetry, politics, really an exophthalmic notebook, and lately I haven’t been writing much. I’m chilled. I’m walking around and absolutely chilled. You see, the church of my childhood asks “what does God demand of you now?” As a boy, a blind kid, the question terrified me. Sometimes I hid in the closet where my parents hung the winter coats in portmanteaus. I pushed into the back. The world wasn’t friendly. God was impatient. And yes it was cold in that closet. That house still stands. I haven’t been there in years. But you see where I’m going—every locale is again that place, potentially, maybe because of an ideomotor effect, a trance in my backbone, a tip of the head. It doesn’t matter. William James would tell us it’s always cold in there—in vertebrae, among the moth balls.

I should say no one taught me to fear God. In fact, by the time I was eight years old my parents had largely given up on religion. I suspect church going interfered with their crapacious Sunday mornings. It doesn’t matter. The chill was perfectly inside.

Disability is lyrical, plastic, it expands and contracts in consciousness and unconsciousness. But in my life—the only one I can reliably plumb and explain with honesty, behind the blindness is a chill and it’s my job, insofar as I understand it, to take the top off that chill, to make the cabin marginally inhabitable. I must accomplish this despite the small town church in memory, in situ in bones; despite Medieval Christians who see graphic testimonies of divine punishment in my sightless frame; oh yes, and despite the topsy turvy ratiocinations of able bodied neoliberals.

I spend my days and nights warming up my God. I ask him for very little. I’m not sure what he gets from it. But it’s a thermal gas universe and plenty of transfers are going on.

 

 

This morning

I wrote “I know”

When Longinus asked—

What are we to say

of inquiries and questions?

 

Of pleading eyes

And voiceless inquiries

He said nothing.

Perhaps he tried

But there’s a lacuna

Equivalent

To about five pages.  

 

I’ve studied philosophers, exegesis, codicils of soul,

Some of their ideas like arrows in flesh

Though (tastefully) the arrows can’t be seen

 

Sometimes I look up from a book

And say: “Death by monads…”

Just a joke between my softly burning

Hands, hearts, eyes

Whatever you wish to call the mind

 

At twilight I ski sometimes

Down to the shore

Where now

They’re building houses

For the rich—dark blocks

Surrounded

By machines

Windows empty

Lightless

Heraclitus looking out….

I tried all afternoon

To translate a poem

Something about a silver toothpick

And a gathering

Of metaphysicians

All of this so long ago

When shadows were thought

To have certain qualities

Of the soul—

There was no idle talk

In all of Greece.

 

Beside me

A rose

In a glass beaker

And a cold cup

Of Russian tea.

 

A shadow falls over your hands

Late at night

As the meal ends.

On the edge of death

One thinks

Of teeth.

 

 

 

I mourn for the one who used to be me—

He was pacified with cold water

A dictionary

Understood

In aggregate

Like the worms

He found

Inside a thistle.