Blind Poets
I have read the works of blind poets
and found there less and so much more,
imagined the energy they may have tried to see and name and color,
wondered about how they dimensioned the world and trivial matters,
whether the trade in gold and diamonds and the like
is little more than a grift.
Acuity of touch by day, fitful voyages in the night
the outstretched fingertips of hearing all,
a fluid map of waters known and unknown:
everywhere limits as familiar as fantasies.
They do not romanticize their condition much less ours.
Why would they?
But I want to believe they know that every chime
as pure and tiny as a footnote comma encircles the spectrum,
from the first baptisms of the fragile
to ancient echoes of work
to premonitions of final surrenders.
They know that hundreds of times each day,
every time the room falls silent
the world all but ends.
Time, invisible, loses the distance,
sometimes with a knife, sometimes with a kiss goodnight,
sometimes an intrepid wink.