Belayed on Sickle Ledge

Amazing Grace

Where to start? Somewhere, way back there. Way, way back there. It starts. It is the same place that it all starts for most of us. When we first see. As infants see. When we first saw. Before speech or nuanced body language. That place of amnesia when the light first bashed into my skull and flooded it with what surely was a glorious and bewildering light. Light. That forgotten time when I saw…we saw… the most beautiful thing of all time. That art filled tracing of initial meeting and meaning, now forever erased. Unknown. See. None of us remember that moment of vision. We saw. It is a place into which a thread of continual consciousness trails back away from me, now, at this moment. I am remembering that place of light that is hidden deep in the darkness of forgetfulness.

Today, as I awoke, I learned I was going blind. That I can’t, and perhaps will never, see things purely. It is not my eyes that are the problem. No, we see. It is my brain, which denies reality with such vehemence that I have fallen on my knees. Begging. Yes, begging as only those who have had something—a thing so precious that it hurts---ripped from their heart. That I can see. Damnation I can see. As if I was on a sloping floor in a fun house. A floor so waxed and shiny that you slide inexorably into the darkness. Again and again. Over and over. That I can still see. Yes, see now. But that first light, that first fusing of meaning when I saw the world for the first time, blinds me in its absence. Today, today and today, I learned I was going blind. Had always been going blind. Whirling like a dervish toward the darkness as if it was the most precious love. Yesterday, I wasn’t going blind.

Yesterday I was blind. That’s when this starts. Whatever this is starts there. A young man, with whom I had been talking, turned away from me as I spoke. As if I had disappeared from his vision. Then I was mute, not blind. Watching him lose interest and, in no uncertain terms, letting me know that my words were meaningless to him. Yet, moments before, he had exchanged what to me were infinitely more meaningless words with another friend of mine. This was in a large and loud crowd of people at a club. My friend said, “He turned away from you,” and laughed. Whether his laughter was at me, or at my ability to become suddenly invisible, I don’t know. After that I felt a rush of disorientation. People and things were reduced to shapes, colors, and textures. As I had just been reduced to meaninglessness, I, in turn, reduced the world. Or so I thought and knew. No, I saw that I knew. No, we saw. And that was the difference. Knowing versus seeing.

I had been blind in my knowing. I had been blind in that I had stopped seeing what was before me. Thoughts and words are such inadequate beasts of burden. No vision. Their backs swayed with the weight of interaction. That reduction I experienced blew off the cowl I had carefully sewn over my sight. Our seeing. When I reached my car I cried. Just walking the short distance, from club to corner, corner to alley, alley to car, had been the most frighteningly alien experience I had ever had. And I have known some very frightening moments in my life. I was blind. I realized this in a viscerally pure way. I did not think it, or recognize it, or know it. I was it. And the world around me was not differentiated from it. I sat inside my car for a long time and wept. My eyes, we grieved for ourselves. My brain grieved for the loss of my eyes. My eyes, we were grieving for the years we have spent lashed to the wheel. Never setting a course of their own. Never setting our own course. Forever they had been a set of slaves to a known and knowing…monster who ate the flesh of vision and spit out thoughts as a consolation prize…brain. I am…me…he…I…brain.

What was I saying? Um, last night. Yeah. Driving home last night was a nightmare. A bloody battlefield between pure sense and sensory perception. I know that now. We saw that then. See that now. But I arrived safe and in no way thoughtless or, as I now see, unburdened. I sat at the kitchen table with the dictionary opened before me. At random I would open the book and stab a finger to the page. Reading the word was difficult, but I could do it. I forced myself to know what it meant, was, represented. What connected ideas and images could I generate from that singular knowing of a string of letters? White cream color black curves lines. We saw. I plunged on. Word after word. Then, increasingly, with every word, an abstraction veered into my sight. We saw. I remember the word “cart” delivered swirls of mustard, green, and purple colored herringbone that obscured all. Something pulled me back to the idea of a horse cart, go-cart, or handcart. At some point I lost consciousness. When I came to, my head was sore from having hit something on the way down to the floor. The vertigo and sensory dysphasia I had been experiencing was gone.

This morning we woke up partially blind. That is, we had developed partial sight. This is when we saw that once we had seen. Way back in the dark. Before the amnesia of knowing replaced us, the eyes, with traitors who spied on the world for that knowing brain. Newness with every blink, everywhere, every time. See. Seeing.

Still the war was not over. This morning my head showed that I had cut myself when I fell the last evening. We saw the matted thatch of copper-brown dried blood above that ear, soft pink paisley, in the dizzying array of color shot clear and reflective on the plane of my bathroom mirror.

Within the battlefield, pain radiated across my temple, down which stretched a swollen vein shadow, our diaphanous light purple-blue against triangle flesh.

We saw.

I’m reaching toward the medicine chest, white silver rectangular, I’m looking, seeing, for aspirin bottle, clear slim curve white with brown and black against yellow with white cap blue shadows of raised letters and striated side shadows of grey. I should stop now…where’s the phone? No, I’ll keep going. I need…aspirin. Then the phone. I need help. Okay…I’ve got the bottle…open.

Pills, white ovoid to my tongue, reddish with buds slightly whitened from sleep, to my hand fleshy orange pink with…too much…too too much.

Hand to glass…too…we see water…too…to mouth…much.

Tiles white grout dark grey cabinets orange with brown and purple.

Head blood red fallen vision see seeing again light dark goneoutfromthereblindplacetopurevisionoutthereforevernowrememberthennowalwaysin
hereseeallorangeredyellowpurplepinkbrownbluecircleroughsmoothseeing?greenseen?
newredtoomuchremembernowthisawwwwseeseeseeseeseeseeseeseeseeseeIamgoingblind
seeseeonceIwasblindnowIcanseeseeseeseesee.

We see.

Hollow Flake Ledge: pendulum traverse

After my dad died when I was twelve my mom went crazy...well she must of been crazy already. No one told me though. So I was left in a big house with her while she slowly dissolved. She tried to kill herself when I was fourteen...I had to crawl through a tiny bathroom window to save her...she was dead I was sure. She just wanted to be with my dad. I guess I understood. She hated me for saving her. She loved me for saving her. It was complicated. I loved her. I miss her. I couldn't save her all those years later. While it is trite to write of such things, and nobody really cares about personal tragedies much, I do care. This is for my mom.

Attempted Umbilicus

It was just a window, small and closed,
as my days had become across that year.

Unlike that sturdy frame, dirty and high,
a single-minded clean sadness hid within.
You, somehow, traveled to the other side,
leaving me to struggle up a ladder to see.
Just a vision of the two of you meeting again,
somewhere on that floor seen through glass.
Where those cold hands grasped for him,
my days were not enough to bring eyes.
Yet I saw you stretched out, cold and content,
breaking that long silence I now owned.
Opened to the wind, that window burned,
searing my growing and mysterious body.
Strength was a question I had asked myself,
never answered until that unknown moment.
As if your still body was a test during this rite,
studied for in books of grief and passage.
My first adult step faltered, mocking infancy,
as I reached for your breathless silence.

Stung by a porcelain anarthria surrounding us,
my cheek blushed from your ghostly slap.
An erasion delivered by motionless tendons,
connected ourselves forever in private violence.
Childhood withered on those cold linoleum tiles,
when I felt the birthing pain of quickened maturity.
Old light flooded my youth through that window,
stealing a notion of personal linear evolution.
I crawled back across that dirty sill and ran for help,
because my wounded umbilicus could not revive you.
After being pumped and carefully prodded in sanatoria,
your body still mimicked death while your eyes flashed.
That wished for crossing was broken by my last act,
young and splendidly reanimating my animator.
You told me that you wished I had never been born,
and the old man who now inhabited my skin agreed.
Still we loved each other as only the weary can,
hands held tight in knowing betrayal of each other.

It was just a window through which a child passed,
I still see him steadied on that ladder without a choice.

Middle Cathedral Rock: Black Rose runout

While no one wants to hear it,
I turn to watch faces close,
Like the end of a day’s work,
In a shop run by strangers.

With one poorly placed thought,
Sidewalk cracks slide akimbo,
Slowly over the decades wear,
Plugging the ears before me.

Perhaps these sandpaper words died,
Somewhere on their way to you,
Like sick migrating birds from afar,
Dropping from the sky on our streets.

But I still cradle and collect feathers,
Burnished and raw from years of travel,
Across the great distances between us,
Sitting side-by-side learning semaphore.

That I wield an aging bullhorn,
Dismissed in the evening traffic,
Which runs wild through my life,
Makes little difference to the deaf.

While I don’t want you to see it,
You turn to watch my tongue still,
Like the end of a life’s work,
In a world run by strangers.