My Brother's Blindness

My Brother's Blindness

"When I consider how my light is spent..."
                            --John Milton, On His Blindness

I think of that first morning
when you wake blind,
that one short moment, a split-
second that will linger for years,
and everything in me softens to tears.
I see how my closed eyelids are a wash
of moving color,
and lose focus.
Although the sun still rises,
the splintered stars still come out, and
each night street lamps are lit,
this world will never again be
a place you can visit.
You will be patient.  Like Milton,
you will only stand and wait.
Wherever you are now, even though
you've stepped away from your body,
a ghost of yourself, I hope
in some other galaxy, in another
dimension,  you may yet see
the light of other suns, other stars,
illuminating everything.

The Earth as Body

The Earth As Body

More than stone and mortar will be found
in the process of excavation, retrieval of evidence,
and recovery: a restoration of loss—

    a half-cent piece, a toy dog, a hinge,
    buttons of many shapes and colors,
    a hair-pin, a glove, a shoe...
    
from top to bottom, from known to unknown.

    a wall, a bone needle, a horn spoon,
    a hatchet, a fish hook, ground water.
   
 When all this detritus of hunger, thirst, lust, pulse,
and breath is squeezed out, wrestled away, evaporated,
and finally re-invented, once all the grubbing's
done, what's the prize?  New obsessions:

    the rare stillness, the perfect freedom,
    the lighted window. Life.
    

    
            —Joyce Ellen Davis

To Catch a Young Moon

To Catch a Young Moon

"If you live in Northern Hemisphere...you might
 be able to catch an exceedingly young lunar crescent..."
 -- EarthSky, April 22, 2012


The almanac portends weather, seed-time and harvest,
and all phases of the moon like a book of poetry.
But there will be no catching of a young moon.
Time counts.  And the moon never looks away.

Night after night after night in its never-looking-away,
its not-so-young face is counterfeit in all earth's mirrors.
It was matched on the waves of ancient seas, before
the swarming ammonites perished, before
the herds of hadrosaurs were lost.  It was there
in the dew of Cretaceous forests, when mammoths
roamed the grasslands of Colorado.
Its dry seas were reflected upon the farther shores
of the Colosseum, in the drowning eyes of
Naiumachiari in their sinking battleships,
and in the dream-blinded eyes of Jeanne d'Arc
crying Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

The same moon.  The same moon broken in the
moving ripples of Bull Run.  The same moon
luminous as a spotlight over the naked bodies
of a million Jews who died in ditches, with their
eyes open.  The same moon caught in the sleepless
eyes of lovers, lustrous on their naked shoulders
and thighs, their long limbs touching.  The same moon
flashing on their smiles.  The band plays,
Pink Floyd breathes: If your head explodes
with dark forebodings I'll see you on the dark side 
of the moon. Their lips whisper in it's fettered light,
Jesus.  Jesus.  Jesus.


JED 5-1-12