One more day I’m a poet
Rolling the planet across a table
Infantile game–macassar oil
On the chairs, Victorian bookshelf
Crammed with taxonomies,
Yes, a stuffed owl
Everyone wants the source
Of the Loire or a finely woven
Net, something informative
As we feel
When the moon comes close
& we’re picking mushrooms
In summer
Here come the dancers, half Greek half sky
Fragrance of goat’s milk and iron—
All day, blind, alone, talking to myself
(For that’s how it was
Lonely kid telling stories to no one
In a bomb shelter, 1960
Already in love with Hercules
Who must have had friends.)
I lay on cement whispering—
How storying unfolded
Talking in the dark
Breathing odors of Army blankets.
Who loves you, who doesn’t
Where’s a lucky window
How high the sun, my lips moving.
Even now I talk to myself.
My wife sees me, says,
“what are you saying?”
I shrug. How can I tell her?
I recite fragments as some boys skip pebbles.
It might be someone else’s words
Maybe Ezra Pound:
“And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass…”
Then again it’s just me: “Trace
The veins of a barberry leaf
That’s Braille enough…”
In sidelong darkness of broken manners
When the day is insufficient
Minutes not feeding me
Up river go the words the outcast words.
Oh anything will do.
Someone has to sing so I do
Beside the hole, my father’s grave
& it’s April snowing Jesus distant
Our Savior much like a blue jay
Going about his business
Talking to no one
Up in a birch.
I take a bird as counsel
Say to my father
“Life was given us
That we will sing
To ghost & bird.”
Ezra Pound in my dream, the young poet
Resembled a singing cobbler—
Instead of shoes he held
Sheets of papyrus
One in each hand
Two stark white portals
Beckoned as if one could enter
& veins on pages
Words & omens
Fritillaries
Butterflies
Theban scrimshaw
Flesh perfected
Diagrams of possible life
I was hurrying in the railway,
Blind man with his dog, dragging luggage,
Drifting sideways, talking to myself,
Modernist vaulted skylights
Above where one pictured
God peering down through soot
For he too saw through a glass darkly
When he deigned to examine us
As I was certain he did just then
In Milan, April,
The poor jostling all about us.
Spreading tales of war across two tables—dogs at my feet
Chimney smoke, Russian tea in a glass,
How young the mind still is
While the exophthalmic Greeks strut
And waves behind them
Wash like hay on hay—
War stories late afternoon
My neighbors thinking of dinner
Spring arriving high in the trees
The neighborhood fills with particles of green.
I want to be the sort of poet whose words build homes for people,
Who reaches agreement with granite and oak to come near—
Habitation is a restlessness among all things, homes require magic.
If possibly there was anything I could do
To give you warmth, well I’d do it.
In my world most things are hidden save for my heart.
I go inside the electric line,
The dream of crows,
Stretched out like a trumpet note,
Upswing, blue, long as ten lives–
Swinging my arms, jouncing,
Flat as a stingray
In fizz of static pulse,
Not a place, but
Where I was always from.
“Let them, when they once get in
Sell the Nation for a Pin;
While they sit a picking Straws
Let them rave of making Laws;
While they never hold their Tongue,
Let them dabble in their Dung.”
Excerpt From: “Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel.” iBooks.
Some days while trying to imagine how to live and what to do—not an exercise but the real thing for you’re disabled, and agencies, services, medical programs that have kept you alive are being dismantled—you must raise your head from despair and picture your enemies dabbling in their dung.
The opportunities always involve wheelchairs, the infirm, the terrible old, or the deformed young. Let them rave of making Laws—or better yet, unmaking them. Trump and his pin selling and smearing minions are hard at work making certain that no child with a disability will get an education or a meal. No family with such a child will get medical care. Cutting medicaid by a third will kill people.
The operative phrase is “trying to imagine how to live and what to do…” Though I’ve been unemployed, have lived in section 8 housing, have survived with the help of food stamps, have received Social Security Disability—though all these things are true, I’m one of the very luckiest disabled for in my mid forties I landed a job and I still have one. I’m one of the ten to fifteen percent of the the disabled who’s employed. But I only survived to “become” a tax payer because of the programs mentioned above. And it never escapes me for a minute that Trump’s proposed budget will render even more cripples both unemployed and largely homeless.
I’m wildly angry. Horrified. Helpless. Sealed in my distemper and terror. I feel like a man I used to know who owned a cottage on the shore of a very stormy lake. One day he went down to the water and began beating it with his fists. “Godamn you lake!” he shouted. I want to shout in the street. Wave my little fists at the wind and trees.
People I know and love are going to die under this administration. On Facebook I see people saying that surely Congress won’t let this budget happen. But this is not the Congress of Tip O’Neil and Everett Dirksen. This Congress will in fact let this budget happen. All I can think of is that man who went down to the shore and beat the water.
My local congressman is a rebarbative and shallow dude named John Katko. He’s held no town hall with his constituents and shows no signs of doing so. I can’t even go downtown and shout at him.
How to live? What to do?
Keep writing. Keep speaking out. Keep your wits about you. Don’t let fascists steal your soul. Nurture goodness. Drink six glasses of water a day if you’re lucky enough to still have clean water.
First time I heard Bach—I do, 1959, winter, New Hampshire, leaning close to the fabric speaker of our Webcore mono electric gramophone, state of the art, symphony number 4, blind eyes bandaged following surgery, hands so small, feeling vibrations in my fingers, first Braille…
But I don’t remember what came next, was it Sibelius “Finlandia” or that horrid recording of Burl Ives singing “Big Rock Candy Mountain”—I can’t recall…
’59 was the year older children told little ones we were eating “radioactive” snow.
Planet of the Blind 