Planet of the Blind

It’s a small life we’re after, minnows in a pond, a donkey beside a ruined house. Most miss it—the sure knowledge that finding is not altaic. The poet says, “let’s be small together,” and the soul takes some comfort.

Emily Dickinson wrote:

“How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn’t care about careers,
And exigencies never fears;
Whose coat of elemental brown
A passing universe put on;
And independent as the sun,
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute decree
In casual simplicity.”

When the soul’s diary tends to smallness it also turns toward aloneness. We are children looking into the shallows. We stand at windows and draw our names on the cold panes. If we’re lucky no adult comes to say we’ve smudged the glass.

A small life “is” absolute decree. It’s enough. And since the soul knows this it grieves for the adult who it must accompany as she’s compelled to go to human resources meetings, endure the social frostbite of politics and all mordant habituations. How many meetings have I attended where I’ve thought: “there isn’t an ounce of life in this room” and wished I could fly to independence? Well, too often to count.

The magnanimity of less and less. Soul says—Once I aspired to tallness like the oak…now it’s magenta seeds I’m after…

Emily Dickinson: “My best Acquaintances are those/With Whom I spoke no Word”

Finger at a window…

I’m sorry for the harm I’ve caused.
This is all I can muster.
My wrist didn’t break when I played tennis
Though I can’t play tennis—
More later—my wrist kept intact
While I didn’t play.
Most people don’t know
What’s in a wrist
But as I’m blind
Hearing tennis,
Ovoid snicks like
No other sound on earth
I dream now
Between beheadings
Of the lunate bone
Yes—moon on top
Of the wrist
Hugging ligaments
And the lower arm bones
Mainstay of the carpal
Moon dust
In a perfect ball
That we may hit another
Thus expressing
Our vexation
At being.

Once I stole a hotel bible and left it on a bus.

**

God Almighty. As the folk singer Greg Brown sang: “America will eat you up.”

**

Protophormia Terraenovae

Pollen in the air
Late afternoon

Lonesome
For my father

Hymn in mind
A blue fly

Lands
On my book

It’s hunger
A thin noise

Discernible
Only

While walking
On Herman Melville

**

This is a story that you forget.
I went away, but did not depart.
And the meadow
Sinks into sorrow:

So
Do not worry.

**

No one knows if the apostle Peter’s femur is truly under the Vatican, though there’s strong evidence in support of the belief.

**

The poet Rumi wrote: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

**

Substitute knowledge for love in Rumi’s declamation. It’s a guaranteed recipe for humility, which when achieved, leads you back to love.

This is all I really know.

Oh, and spearmint gum doesn’t have any spearmint in it.

I was in a Manhattan coffee joint on the corner of Lexington and Thirty-ninth, my guide dog  curled at my feet. She flicked her tongue like an ant eater looking for crumbs.

A man seated nearby said to someone via cellphone: “I told you not to sell the thing!”

I wondered what “the thing” could be.

This was an obvious pleasure.

My blueberry.

**

For the reason
That many may think otherwise
I listen to my simple heart

**

Things we can miss:
Leaves shaded for morning
Paths for both hands
The gift of smoke, echoes in rooms

Sometimes our eyes were bitter
When birds had flown

**

Napkin

After everything
After so much blind life
Not seeing true stars
Or the face of my wife
I will go
And the going will be green
Joyful, satisfied, bowed-down…

**

Mornings I roll a wheel
Unseeable
East to West
North to South
In the privacy
Of my room

**

Yellow Bird

Though I couldn’t see you, not precisely, I touched the window…

**

In the story of Brigadoon people are enchanted in a mythic village, a place of love outside of time and customary space. There are hundreds of variants of the story and of course there’s Lerner and Loewe. Heck there’s even a Star Trek version.

No one carries luggage…

**

From the Finnish Hunger Museum: Thistle Soup

You’re hungry so you walk into a field
Grab two handfuls of spiky thistles
(You don’t have gloves)
Chop and boil
Until water absorbs the sap
And you have some very green juice
Add two quarts of stock
Two wild onions — tops and all —
Now toss in 1/2 pound of fish

(Heal-all, Poore Man’s Jewell…)

**

More about appetite:

I needed to find a job. I wanted an engaged life. Notice: blind poet seeks employment. I licked envelopes and stuffed them in the mail. Was it my imagination or did rejections come as fast as I posted my letters? Of course the odds were steep. I applied for government assistance: section 8 housing; food stamps, social security disability. I took a penalty and cashed in my modest retirement savings from my decade of adjunct teaching. I applied to arts colonies where writers and artists are fed and housed while they work on their current projects. I wore a path in the sidewalk between my apartment and the local post office. The post master loved my guide dog and gave her biscuits. She’d turn toward the federal building whether we were headed there or not.

**

I write poetry, a foolishness
Much like thinking
The heart
Has an Edenic flavor—
Continue my mistake
In these times

I’m dying king alright
Fine saying so
When I was very small
My father bought me
A kite and you can imagine
That sightless boy
Holding a string

The winter wind made itself known last night
Though its still October
And leaves are only beginning to die
Such impatience

**

The Explanation

When the river asked me to join
The night was still
So I put half my arm
In there—cold bone brother
And sure
River wasn’t satisfied—
It begged for more arm.
I plunged up to my shoulder
Like a man
Who’s dropped his car keys
Reaching among reeds
Feeling my ancestors
Grandfather was giddy
With parturition and slick
“God help me,” I thought
“Letting fast river talk me
Into metempsychosis”
Water flowed one way
The dead the other.

**

I know a thing or two about loss:
In a room of happy men and women
I’m the interloper, a caste thing
Like a button on a drowned man’s coat
So that you must look away—
Americans like a healthy difference
Not a febrile haunted body
With static of blindness
Or hands flapping.
My tribe…
How many times
Have I left a party
To stand among crickets?

**

The Buddha said, “The past no longer is. The future has not yet come. Looking deeply at life…in the very here and now, the practitioner dwells in stability and freedom.”

I don’t believe any of this.

**

My face has harvested black currants.

**

In a college class recently one of my students at Syracuse said people dressed better in the United States fifty years ago. “Have you been to Wal Mart lately?” she asked. “Everyone slumps around in pajamas and horrible sweat pants.”

“Well,” I said, “fifty years ago people dressed up because there was a general expectation you could get a job. Dress for Success meant something. Nowadays millions have given up. A new slogan might be: Why Get Dressed When You’re Depressed?”

**

Nothing terrifies us more than godforsaken faces. Let your face always spark.

Let it be real and alive.

Imagine this for your friend.

Imagine it for someone you don’t necessarily like.

Every face is a foreign dialect we can get to know.

Yes, I’m blind but I know your face.

**

Driving at night with a pal…

Confession is hard and long
Watching exhaust
Being discharged
Mile by mile

**

Two crickets outside my window. Water falls on my wrist bone; I still have life inside life.

I climbed to the top of Helsinki’s highest ski jump and swayed with my arms out like a fluid moon-struck Jesus but I then climbed down again, thinking of my mother.

**

Boyhood: in the courtyard while the evening news came from the radio, I played with a wooden top and laughed because it sounded like my cat.

**

You don’t have to be well known. Repeat. It’s enough to read books and drink tea. Rain welcome.

**

I love small littered towns one sees from the train.

**

The sun in memory is always as strong as before.

**

Theodore Roethke. My buttercup.

**

Water shining through trees. What a bargain!

**

Blind I drive home through the glitter of moon-skin treetops.

To let a blind man in your shop
Whereas he’ll enter
Wherefore he’ll touch things
Whereby deep in the merchandise
Olfactory stuff will occur
(Somatosensory tickles
From a feathered hat
Will become a raincloud inside out)
There’ll be a scent of roses
Though no one is dead
Though Braille of the ordinary
Dangles from hooks…
Though your mother
Is long in her grave
She won’t be part of the sale
For my people are not occult
We feel love in our sleeves
Feel the spine’s dorsal pressure
I don’t care what you sell

— “And where does the shoulder end, the breast begin?”

**

Make me a poem, make it warm for winter.
Dark ocean, give us sail.

**

May it be cheap to live in—the soul.
Let’s inhabit the mind for a long, short time.

**

Just so.

**

Here in our heavenly quarters:

Spinoza—most secret thoughts.

Love. Black sky.

**

Like a falling leaf
The boy in me
How to take him with me
As the years advance?

Finnish poet Paavo Haavikko:
I hear a happy tale, it makes me sad:
no-one will remember me for long.

The boy-blind…

He was never “in” time
Like those oaks you see
In certain forests
Still green
Though there’s more of darkness
And we’re long into December.

**

Marvin Bell:

“Dead man’s music is nighttime, call it earthly, call it planetary.”

**

Difficult keeping a journal with silly phenomenological crayons…

**

I come too seldom down to the water.
The neighboring lake.

**

When a horse passes me
I feel his mystery.
Evening sky.

**

One Day (A Micro Disability Memoir)

He sees at last infirmity is a trick.
something achieved with string,

a game played best on the floor—
puzzle, wish, fear, and ache

are what a magician is for.
Its raining as always

but he has a stick
and he waves it at the orient wind.

The boy in me
How to take him along
As the years advance?

Finnish poet Paavo Haavikko:
I hear a happy tale, it makes me sad:
no-one will remember me for long.

The boy-blind…

He was never “in” time
Like those oaks you see
In certain forests

Still green
Though there’s more of darkness
And we’re long into December.