Planet of the Blind

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

Uncle history spreads tales
Across two tables
It’s the incitement
For stories
That he likes
Alexander
The horse whisperer
Tames Bucephalus
And rides that horse
To the ends
Of the earth
Mostly the past
Is about dreams
And animals
And of course
Aristotle
Who said philosophy
Can make men sick

During a rough patch
Aunt history
Left her husband
And went to Carthage
To see her parents
Dido and Acerbus
This was before
They were killed by fire
It was a good time—
Pygmalion
Visited
And gave out
Silver toothpicks—
(The ivory girl
Yet to come)
There was laughter
In the manner
Of demi-gods
A mechanical sound
Tin birds colliding
“Well” she thought,
“At least History laughs
Like a man”
When she got home
She found History
Could also weep

I dreamt of Charles Olson
And a persimmon tree
There was fog
And there were ships
In a wide channel
It was autumn
The poet placed
A poor man’s apple
In my hand