America, 2025
We were wrong to believe in our hands
Whether of strength or delicacy—
Laboring
Or the piano in the mind.
We’re fiction now
Or half unreal like babies
And no one will tell us
How it will be.
There’s no fortune teller.
Young and old
Can’t grasp
Immediate things.
A sustained smallness
Hangs from our sleeves
Though we keep waving…
A woman sneered at me not long ago. We were on an airplane. Her seat was next to mine. Spotting the guide dog at my feet she pitched a fit. She told everyone within earshot that she was allergic to dogs. She needed immediate attention. She demanded a seat in First Class. She was, as they say, a “hot mess” and I tried to empathize—who am I to say she didn’t have allergies or that this wasn’t a deep inconvenience for her? Yet her nastiness was the thing. She was affronted by the very idea that I was “there” in that space. She sizzled with contempt.
If you’re disabled you know all about the contempt sizzlers. As Mark Twain would say, “you’ve met them on the river.”
**
More about the river…
The river is god itself. Not your ideas about it. Not your yearnings. It goes about its business, moving the glory of creation wherever it needs to go. Children sit on the banks dreaming. This is proper prayer.
The ableists’ river is also god itself. Its where self-contempt goes to bathe. And here come the cripples, floating down stream like loaves of bread…
**
You see, some days a cripple just doesn’t know what to say.
River. Bread, Children. Dreams. God in the mix. And sad strangers who can’t speak our language.
**
I wish that woman with her dog allergy well. I don’t think she had an allergy at all. It was in her voice. Studies show you can spot liars by their intonations. Hers said: “I’m a nasty, self absorbed wart. And I want you to pay attention to me.”
The dog just slept.
This morning I feel strongly that her tribe has taken the reins of our government.
A few years back I attended a speech by two senators who were instrumental in passing the Americans with Disabilities Act: Tom Harkin and Bob Dole. A Democrat and a Republican. They spoke about the bipartisanship that made the ADA possible. But then Bob Dole said something that made my ears prick up: “Today’s GOP would never support this.” The Tea Party was in vogue. Hatred of cooperation was the new rule. This was before Trump.
This morning we’re seeing the GOP controlled House fresh off of voting to eliminate Medicaid and other crucial programs for veterans, the disabled, the poor, and the elderly, flat out crowing about their wonderful new bill.
They have a collective allergy.
This is a poem the way your grandfather was your father
It likes you but prefers to know very little about you
In short: its the principle of art
I want you to have a good time
But if you don’t its because grandpa had it worse
Let’s say adulthood starts when you’re 18
If so, I’ve been writing poems all my adult life
That’s fifty one years of scribbling incomprehensible notes
And in all that time
The trees were trying to tell me something
Last night walking in rain in downtown Helsinki
I wanted to tell them how sorry I am for never hearing
I whispered beside the old Swedish theater
Is it too late
To have a proto-prayer for the trees?
And the terrible dime store Santa Clauses everywhere…
Mozart’s String Quartet in G —the allegro playing softly in memory. For me it carries the sense of standing on a dark riverbank with far off light starting to appear over the forest. Gloomy river and the promise of improved weather. Anyway I like the sadder parts of Mozart. He seems more honest in the sad registers.
Let’s be candid though. Mozart could get people to dance. This is a time of dolor and we will need joy to get through unless you’re a thick head. You may read into that what you will.
I like the sadder parts of Mozart. I love Book 11 of The Odyssey. I favor the underworld in the Kalevala. I like the image of death’s swans gliding silently over the frozen lake of the afterlife. I like bitter candies.
This morning, walking in downtown Washington, DC without my guide dog, waving my white cane, merely looking for coffee, I was accosted by two homeless men. They descended upon me and fought over which one of them was going to escort me across the street. It’s a sad world. I wrenched free and plunged into traffic. Survived. Got coffee. I’m on the waiting list for a new guide dog as mine has retired. Thought of how people will generally leave you alone if you’re navigating with a big ass dog. Thought of how I might have been killed this morning looking for Starbucks. Thought of the swans mentioned above.
Yes this is a strange and uphill life for most of us. Those who don’t see it that way think Trump is a great dancer.
My hands are today helpless. I used them to vote against fascism just last week. It was foolish of my hands to think they had power. Today my hands are grieving and their grief differs from that of the head or heart: my hands are those of a sailor who desperately wants to put the ship on the right course—hands that are educated, seasoned, and moral.
As I grow older my hands open more slowly. Maybe they know more? What’s empty turns its face to us, said a good poet, long ago. My hands read Braille poorly. My hands which have touched Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle wheel. Hands that pull the voting lever for freedom.
There are several good books about hands. One of my favorites is “Victorian Hands: The Manual Turn in Nineteenth Century Body Studies” edited by Peter J. Capuano and Sue Zemka. Hands are transformed by the industrial revolution—they become vulnerable instruments seemingly designed through evolution to operating machines. They are all too often dismembered. Hands become “throw aways” as much as anything else.
My hands are today helpless. I used them to vote against fascism just last week. It was foolish of my hands to think they had power. Today my hands are grieving and their grief differs from that of the head or heart: my hands are those of a sailor who desperately wants to put the ship on the right course—hands that are educated, seasoned, and moral.
What about the hands of those who voted for fascism you say. These are the descendent hands of industrial labor, desperately caught up in the machines of their own doom. They voted, essentially, for “throw away” hands.
My favorite poem about hands is by Jane Hirshfield
A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.
Nor is it palm and knuckles,
not ligaments or the fat’s yellow pillow,
not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.
A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines with their infinite dramas, nor what it has written, not on the page, not on the ecstatic body.
Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping— not sponge of rising yeast-bread, not rotor pin’s smoothness, not ink.
The maple’s green hands do not cup
the proliferant rain.
What empties itself falls into the place that is open.
A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.
Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.
Every writer is now a “brand” and by golly you should have to pay for every word from him/her/they/etc. I vote against this. So my superannuated blog will continue. It won’t cost you a cent.
I started my blog “Planet of the Blind” back in 2007. I’ve been blogging more or less regularly ever since. Lots of people have taken blogging into monetized realms and more power to them. As for me, I think there are already too many pay walls and subscription platforms. Back in the early 1990’s I heard a young hipster poet talking about “po-biz” by which he meant the actual business of being a noted poet. He talked about poetry like an advertising executive. This has only gotten worse with the advent of social media. Every writer is now a “brand” and by golly you should have to pay for every word from him/her/they/etc. I vote against this. So my superannuated blog will continue. It won’t cost you a cent.
**
This morning my wife asked me what I was thinking. We were walking the dogs. I was reflecting on the bro-cast influencer Joe Rogan who opined that journalists have been unfair to Trump. He singled out MSNBC’s Joy Reid and said she’s been gaslighting King MAGA by calling him a fascist. Well you know, he is a fascist. That’s not gaslighting Joey-boy. Why don’t you go light a fart.
**
Alright. Essay on Green Leaves
Midday, late summer clouds. This is the hour when I was happiest as a child–alone in the woods, everything quiet. Somewhere far off the town had a parade. I was alone in my cave-green, darker than morning village, trees donning sorrow hats. And the birds quiet. Hint of coming rain.
**
I live in the communion of words with my firm shoulder blades and half groomed head and read as much as I can about liberty and I say what I must.
**
Write some lines in your notebook, live for a time, after all…
**
Closing Arguments
Over lunch recently with my friend P (whose identity I shall protect, for he is a goodly man) I uttered the word “squalorship” when detailing “accide”—the term for academic indolence. We laughed at the refinements of mispronunciation. Then, since I’m a blind person, I forked up a slice of lemon from my mediterranean salad. I chewed and swallowed. As for “squalorship” I prided myself on having coined a new term.
Resisting accide I decided to look it up. “Squalorship” is, according the Seadict online dictionary:
The living conditions available to a student who has been issued a
student loan from the Federal or Provincial governments;
also the living conditions available once the collection agencies
start looking for the loans to be paid back.
**
I ate the lemon. I wondered “what is my name now” having swallowed. I thought “there are divisions of waters between the living and the dead; on the far shore, outside of time, where money is useless, has my father, long gone, also eaten a lemon?”
Here in the half destroyed world where we paint the walls blue, where children leave finger prints on the windows, what reconnaissance do we have? Which protean shape of identity becomes me, or you?
Lemon eater. Glad fool. Resisting accide. Still demanding cut glass ideas against Lilliputian strings.
**
Post lemon, its taste still on my tongue, I walked up a hill and thought of John Locke and his Letter Concerning Toleration. Locke, because he was Jefferson’s muse—more than Montesquieu or Hume. Why Jefferson with lemon? I’m preparing a course on Jefferson’s lives of ideas, both the good ones and the bad.
“That any man should think fit to cause another man — whose salvation he heartily desires — to expire in torments, and that even in an unconverted state, would, I confess, seem very strange to me, and I think, to any other also. But nobody, surely, will ever believe that such a carriage can proceed from charity, love, or goodwill. ”
Excerpt From: John Locke. “A Letter Concerning Toleration.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/2Z92L.l
Of converted states I know very little, I confess. I can admit this much. And like Jefferson, I’m more of a deist (small “d”) than a contrarian Christian.
I love Locke’s figure (transitive) of a carriage. If salvation has value it must reside in motion. If motion has value it must be progressive.
What do I believe? Resisting accide. Value in the proper carriage.
**
“What of squalorship?”
College should be free.
Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson and George Washington both enjoyed lemons.
Oedipus
When you blinded yourself you became a walking advert for thievery. It was customary in Thebes to blind criminals. You stole truth from dust clouds. You stole love from everything including the grass. Those who pretend to love must grope their ways through orchards and stumble in dry riverbeds. Sometimes you lay down in a woody place and without skill braided your own hair.
Late Chapter
One migrates backwards
Into the emptying self
Of course the family is no help
Mother stands before the mirroring sea
Father climbs up and down the rope
Left to him by his own father
Now and then, when I think I’m alone
I sing a lullaby to sunlight
I will lie down without trembling
There are so many things I don’t believe…
There are so many things I don’t believe. As in, when rose petals fall on my dead mother’s hair my shadow is more real than my body—mommy is under the ground, go on Stephen, shake your fist, your real fist, shake it and demand a voice you can live with.
I don’t believe pictures on the water. My sister sees gods and angels there. I intend to eat the small fish. I was spoiled for much of life by reading Mallarme when I was young and in the hospital.
And in the evenings I loll like a wooden ship, a weak lantern can be seen if the weather is just right.
Planet of the Blind 