Monday they take a knife to my eye
Well near my eye
Something big and pink is growing on my left lower lid
What if I twitch?
I don’t know what to think
I read Mac Low’s light poems just in case
And Milton’s “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent”
And think on Homer
And wonder if it’s hard to use a red-tipped cane
We can sell my library
Life without books to dispel the dark
That’ll be strange
Over the roof of the neighbor’s house and through the branches of our backyard jungle and into the window where I sit and write: the Saturday morning sun
I wander out for breakfast
The sidewalks are full of young bodies
Up all night?
I’m driven crazy by their tight jeans
Blind I’ll no longer worry about my invasive male gaze
Song World opens early
The owner’s setting out a box of cheap CDs
I bought Coltrane and Johnny Hartman from him last week
We share a few pleasant words
The vista opens up right where his shop is
Where the boulevard curves
Glare on the windswept river
As if Maya’s flesh beneath her dress were incandescent
Borul and I meet in Mount Edzo
“My head,” he says
In his palm: three yellow tablets
He says, “I know I’m in trouble”
He points at the table
“Look at the aura around those scratches”
I stand on a bridge squint into the wind imagine the thing on my eyelid a big blob of something where nothing should be a big redness growing past the margins of vision til the light of pastness is the only light I see
As if the lightbulb in my windowless room has a broken filament
My memory will be my image-base
And my memory is bad
This is way over the top
I stop for a cup of tea at Mystery Glyphs
They’ve got a little show up by my friend the young photographer
I don’t know why he calls it Old Time TV Stars
It’s all self-portraits except a photo of a Japanese garden bridge by the side of a pool in which there are big orange fish
One table over two women talk
I think they’re social workers
“The ward is a war zone,” one says
“The patients are crazy their families are crazy the doctors are crazy the administrators are crazy the nurses”
“The nurses are ok,” the other breaks in
I don’t know why I’m carrying on so
I’ll still have one eye left
Suddenly Dylan’s voice is in my head
“Here comes the blind commissioner”
I riff on it and a Palmer poem I read yesterday
Here comes the blind philosopher
Here comes the blind fanatic sheik
Here comes the blind and bought senator
The blind dialectician
The blind priest
The half-blind me
I walk home slowly through the bright day
The rain of light onto the specific densities
Joy’s still in bed
She smiles and opens her arms
“Hug,” she says
“Let me tell you my dream”
