Planet of the Blind

Saarkikoski said
To me people are more like houses
Than the houses themselves
I know what he means
That ruined old man across the way
His sons dead in the war
Wife paralyzed
Or that’s how it went
Now no one’s there
The moon is new tonight
And looks like a boot
Tangible abstractions
Wood, stones, people
Let’s write a charm
For the houses, stones,
Disfigured spirits
The leafless branches…

“Witches are living projections of feelings that defy easy rationalization or reconciliation: amity and enmity, compassion and cruelty, self-confidence and fear.”

Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction
Malcolm Gaskill

So too with blindness. From Jose Saramago to Anthony Doerr; from Blind Pew to Dickens blindness is the living projection of the sighted. And if you’re blind like me you get to live it. Every day.

The sighted are terribly weak. I think of them as akin to children who must step over the cracks on sidewalks lest they break their grandmother’s backs.

Seeing is the superstition. Blindness is just life.

Jesus, don’t get me started.

Amity and enmity. Stay away from the blind at all costs.

Blidness is pestilence.

I’m the blind boogeyman who’s going to steal your sighted life.

Tell them what you want
Crow dancing in the bird bath
Snow falls from the roof
Grandfather wrote:
“A difficult field
Rocks and buried roots”
The end never finds
The beginning
A rowan tree in mind
Clouds low
Always wearing
The wrong shoes
Just a man
Just

Growing old talking to myself
Hands inflexible
Reaching for chestnuts
Cold river of childhood
A boat ride in Finland
A girl with golden hair
Played a flute
Something something
I say its winter
There’s nothing to do
This much I know
Night doesn’t push us
But the days…

Who was the composer who heard apples in a basket
Can’t remember this snowy morning
Spending time with a barn cat
Talking to the blind horse
So much of what I do
Is unimportant
One writes myths
A troll who loves geese
Protects lost animals
Down valley the river
Has melted and frozen again

    —for Dan Simpson

Since all that we dream is forever true
I’m calling you now
In a blue light
The moon feels its heart

Of friendship there’s much to say
I love what you love, the music
With its candles and spoons
I think you sing better than me

Sometimes resting my hands
On a table as I do tonight
A constellation swims
Back and forth

So it doesn’t matter
I’ve no skill and some luck
I’m large with this
Press of amity

And tomorrow waking
I’ll be lost again
But remember
Our secret talk

I slept above the city
And in my dream
Expectant faces
Of the dead appeared.

Love was rising
Broken hands, Dante’s missing jaw,
The hoof on an ox…

I rose higher
Until the dead-love
Was difficult to see.

“Ah,” said a voice not like my own,
“This is when the soul works best.”

I love the horse at Lascaux
Half the world
Risen from the very earth
So unsecured and fast
Legs vanishing
Even as we look
No one to tame her
Only the river’s light

**

It wouldn’t work for me, the poem you write
My private dead
Hang around too much, poems
Are cold here
In this region of floating baskets

**

A dream of teeth and I woke chewing a rope—a French knot from the Commune, tied with vengeance. Stars at the window, topiary gardens in the distance. If only I could escape my bonds. My dear life, my stubborn jaws and the hourglass just out of reach. “Oh poetry,” I cried, “what apparatus of report have we here?”

**

One night
In London
I saw a man
Talking gently to a statue
His earnestness
A thing of alchemical
Beauty
As if he too
Had been a rose
Or become Europa
Had loved
The queen—
Keeping her alive…

**

Morning custom:
Keep with dream-prayers,
Whisper, look into the lake.

Hold fast, don’t be troubled,
Sadness waits in the library.

**

In my poems, or, go ask Freud:

Old lovers flit through the trees—
Ah but what kind of trees—
Birches with gold ringlets
By the lake

Sometimes
High in the branches
Trolls look down at me

Just a boy really
Searching
For mushrooms

**

If you can drag yourself to believe
God’s eyes are on this morning
All great things are yet to come

**

Something we can miss
Leaves shaded perfectly for morning
Paths for both hands
Echoes in rooms

Sometimes our eyes were bitter
When birds had flown away

**

Poetry happens off the page
Until it sustains something
Like an injury, a twisted neck
Arriving at the page-clinic
Conceding a belief
In predestination—here
On a tiny ball
Everyone’s a poet
For love begins
Taking us places,
Though at the doctor’s
We have so many wounds
One wonders how we travelled far
I fill my bag with apples
Disengaging myself
From the corpses of me—
(Whitman’s phrase)
Then walk uphill
Without plans at all

Not all the stars were right today

In Finnish, my father’s language, “toivo” means hope

I’m a toiveikas mies—a hopeful man

I come from a long line of optimistic Scandinavians

Like many Finns I’m accepting of slow change

Essentially I’m more of a Finn than an American

I push steadily, keep on message, say what I think needs to be said

Not all the stars were right today

But some were coming together

Beyond the telescopes

Each day I set pen to paper
The pen is in my head
Paper is far in the future
I say think what you want
Release crows
From cages

**

I feel sorry for the sighted
Scanning tiny boxes
Looking for escape
Tyrannies of plot
Like owning a bust of Stalin
Which you have to explain
With cartoons

**

Now an old man comes down the street
A kind of scrawny angel
Pushing a bent bicycle
Spokes flash in the sun
He’s a Korean war veteran
Compared to him
everyone else
is motionless

**

Then again it’s just me: “Trace
The veins of a barberry leaf
That’s Braille enough…”
In sidelong darkness
When the day is insufficient
Minutes not feeding me
Up river go the words
The outcast words
Oh anything will do

**

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.)

**

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 left hand agrees, longs to touch her
My right is stoical
Leaves fingerprints
Like tracks of deer in snow