Planet of the Blind

Looking up, Uncle history
Sees the past—clouds
Represent Pol Pot
Treetops whisper
Of the slave trade
He has a neck ache
And his hands twitch
Holidays are hard
Labor Day? Don’t
Get him started
“Look! Up in the sky!
It’s Henry Ford
With a Tommy gun!”
There’s a cloud straight above
With a keyhole
At its center

As Jung put it:
Where is a height
Without depth?
You must let children grow up
But you must also let them grow down
Poets know—Wordsworth knew
The ballast of childhood
Stays in the boat forever
Some nights I wake
From deep down
To the sound of water

I’m at a conference feeling lonely
Outside a brutalist building
In the falling snow
I have a perfectly reasonable
Conversation with a pigeon…
Its dusk and smokers arrive
Laughing about a colleague
Its a fact that pigeons are the only birds
Who can recognize themselves
When the day is insufficient
In the darkness of broken manners
I love my pigeon for this

The penny I dropped rolled under the couch
And on my hands and knees
I groped for the thing—
It was my mother’s
Who’d been gone thirty years
A gift from her father
Who taught her to shoot
And left her alone on the farm
A girl of ten—saying:
“Shoot first, ask questions later”
She sat with a pistol in her lap
When her father returned
He paid her—so this coin
Beneath a hotel sofa
Represents fear and triumph
Which I dare not let leave behind…

On the mountainside
There’s a troll
There’s a hut
This is how stories begin
He thinks
Aside from longevity
Uncle history
Isn’t well read
But he’s onto something
You won’t become a poet of summer
Until you’ve sharpened
The knife of loss
He likes this
Writes it down
The sun rises above dead trees
The animal-gods of creation have gone

“What if,” asks Aunt History
“we’ve outlived
The age of thankfulness”
A truth she thinks—a stone
In our shoes
‘What if Ur had lasted?
We’d be giving thanks
With cuneiform on rude clay”
From Sumerians
To the Persians
Plenty of thanks
Sell a horse? Thanks
Plant a garden? Thanks
This morning
All the people she meets
Have dead eyes

Don’t let a day go by
Without shy unasked for things
Its possible you’ll have to imagine them
A cat who turns up, missing an eye
Or wind blown paper
Advertising the joys of others
All wonder is your own affair
Years ago I sat in a boat
Left rotting on dry land
For its wood-talk souls

If you stand in rain
Waving a sign in a strange language
You are the one
The balloon of your sorrow
Drifts above your head
You stand determined
Sealed in shade
If you are the one

Autumn trees turn red
Sunday morning—
They speak of the lamb
And you see her, somewhere near
Your eyes filled with water
If you are the one

No one knows how to converse
There are monsters in the streets
Ogres plan
To burn the orphanage
Back in the day
Aunt history
Drank tea with Yeats
He told stories
A dead crone
Washed a dead child
In the middle of a river
And the moon
Behind clouds
Came and went
As it does tonight

Auntie and Uncle history think about
Having children
But they’re never
In the present
Still their names imply family
They must have relatives
Though no DNA test
Can prove it
This is why they read so much
Confucius, Jefferson
Dostoevsky
It doesn’t matter who
“I felt that way once,”
They say
Running their fingers
Down the pages