January 2005

Last night, a man without arms
dived in a pool on TV. His daughter attested
to his love for her: he can squeeze me
with his legs. How organs compensate
for the absence of others. So the blind hear
more acutely the ghostly vanishings.
As to the deaf, how can their eyesight
compensate for their lack of ears?
Read my lips instead. They read
the conductor’s baton. Each fluctuation
they interpret, even wind in the trees.
Do whitecaps presage storms? The smell
from an exhaust betrays a make and model,
and possible mechanical failure.
From others come their doings, from breath,
the meals they ate, from their bodies, cases
of nerves. As those whose lungs fail them
develop the pecs of Olympic swimmers;
those without arms wear legs as sturdy as oaks.
***********************

A rain-cloud passed before the sun and darkened the sky.
And after the cloud passed, suddenly it was very bright.
When it’s dark, I too feel dark. And when it’s bright, I feel bright again.
I’m walking over the pedestrian bridge at the college as if I were approaching a precipice.
But then I’m leaning over the precipice on the college pedestrian bridge for the sun,
and I’m as happy as the sun is bright.
But sometimes it’s a solar eclipse over the precipice
and there’s nothing of any immediate value to be viewed that I can think of.
So I spit upon the bald pate of a passerby with pure impunity
and curse the world with a tear in my eye that beclouds the very sun
that I was looking for.
and the assault charge pressed upon me by that bald passerby
hangs in a legal cloud from which I can never ever escape
so I lean upon the precipice of the pedestrian bridge at the college
as if I wished to fall in, but I don’t yet.