Planet of the Blind

Breathing Space

When I pray I go to the basement
This is where they sent me as a boy
I ask God if he grasps my rejection
Darkness is present, an absolute

Over time blackness arranges itself
Words shrivel
Its a small bravery the prayer
Like mushrooms in fall

Like Gunnar Ekelof I sometimes crush the alphabet between my teeth. Whenever I do this I hear organ music from far away, from some church that stands behind a confluence of hills. And whenever I do this its night. And the moon passes her hands softly over my eyes. Meanwhile I chew on words rather than writing them down. This is my life: angry, gentle, ears open, and the words with too much cartilage…

Dear Oedipus

When you blinded yourself with a pin you made yourself a walking advertisement for thievery, a matter you well understood since in Greece it was customary to forcibly blind thieves and turn them loose to beg on the roads. You stole truth from the dust clouds. You stole love from everything including grasses and the eels. Those who pretend to love are its antithesis. So you advertised duplicity and double dealing while groping your way through orchards and stumbling in dry riverbeds. Sometimes you lay down in a woody place and without skill braided your own hair.

More Lines Suggested by Harry Martinson

In the islands you see the bravest birds
And they are strangely like you—

A nakedness, a hunger…
This is what our refusal to die really is

A red memory surrounded by light
And I imagine yes, I will never get home

Thinking of Harry Martinson

A stone bridge in a woody place—
You know where it is
Halfway between stalks without blossoms
And the houses of grandfathers

The path is just grass
Where no one arrives
And I remember as a boy
Built on insecure emptiness

On hands and knees
Blind in a forest
Feeling how something
Was taking my place

The Helen Keller Joke

Do you remember the old “Helen Keller joke” where the family moves her furniture? What can I say? It hurt me as a blind child.
The old saying, “sticks and stones” is nonsense.
The motive behind that joke was to make a blind-deaf woman appear insignificant, which means, beneath contemplation.
In my world I want all the children to play together happily.
I want a new language to develop.
Meanwhile I’m going to travel all day in the open boat of a poem.
In other words I’m going to merely grow.

After a Dark Winter I Pressed My Face Against an Apple Tree

The birds watched as I made my way
A blind man groping among fruit trees

I’d say his life chafed against him
But he believed in alchemy

He said to himself, I am so vulnerable!
Hurry! Even on a warm afternoon

The world made him ill at ease
He stood a long while in blue weeds

He heard how the branches swung
In a wind that swings

In a life that sways toward life
A man nimble fingered

And so he found a smooth skin
At the bottom of the sky

Where his forehead fit
Kiss to kiss eyes closed

Though this wasn’t the story, not at all
It was the insignificant heart

That was what it was

Soundings and Tracks

This morning taking my trash to the curb I thought how utterly useless the dead are. We have thousands of years of ghost stories but none about the dead as helpmates. I want the dead to clean my house. I’m well over sixty and I’ve given up on making new friendships. But I could use some spirits without expressions to handle my basic chores.

What would I pay them? I’d give them a miniature self portrait where I’m half human, half mole.

If they washed my windows (a fitting job for them) I’d give them the straws I use to measure snow in winter.

Its late spring, almost summer and the birds are flying today with a renewed willingness, as if they’ve solved the trick of living power animated by their ancestors.

But living men and women are trapped, doing their own chores…

You can tell me anything

You can tell me anything
Your words don’t matter
There’s an iron kettle inside you
Where the soiled rags of your ancestors
Float and sink
By a riverbank