Draw and Dissipate

There I was, the center, in a way, of nine hundred thousand books in various languages, but I found I could barely make out the title pages and the spines.

—jorge luis borges, “Blindness”

When Borges was appointed director at Biblioteca Nacional of

Argentina, he became aware of a majestic irony. When I got

the news of my own impending blindness, I failed to see the irony,

but I knew my life would change. That was certain. And so it is

for anyone. There are things so obvious, they needn’t be mentioned,

yet this is all we hear. Weather. Sporting results. The wildland fires

were certain events. Event was a thing that belonged to history.

But the now lived in objects you could see all the better

if you closed your eyes. See the word smoke in the Nordic dictionary

under wanting. See the way it twists around your neck. The air

was full of abandoned horses. The bony seeds of pinecones

jettisoned. The air was full of school shootings, terrorists

stripping wires in basements, Fox News hostesses uncrossing mantis 

legs, saying, Our work is faith-based & faith-directed, so get a job.

Fate shrugs its tired shoulders. I want to slink off to a place

where even the daily record would hesitate to go. I would never regain 

what I lost, so the old doctor said. The old doctor with the new young wife. 

His little baby as a word that burned a finger hole in his white jacket.

And I might go blind. Christ, I thought: blind. Dead was one thing. I could 

handle death. But blindness? Floating forever in the deprivation tank? 

You know that catastrophic thinking you have when you consider

tax season or spring? Or deer season in which you are the blind deer 

haplessly following the scent of the meadow into the clearing?

I would need to divorce. I would need to move to a home & learn how

to live without sight. I would forget what anyone looked like. Even myself. 

There was no way I would be strong enough for any of those things. 

Time is light & sometimes a good cigar or a useful noun can break

the spell. Other things. Most things. The blind photographer John Dugdale 

retained a crescent moon of vision that worried him crazy. Yet he said, 

when he finally lost it all, he understood he could be completely free.

My form of blindness stems from bad retinas, which has resulted

in an ever-diminishing field, a tiny island of light, sinking. A kind

of narrowing spotlight, it was really the gathering darkness that worried me, 

the mathematical encirclement closing in the way those old movies

would snap to a gray winter light, the word Fin before the fade & vanish

in spectral terror. The little I’m left with staves off the black totality by pure, 

uncertain luck, or hope, or my inability to consider who I would be

once the last neutrino flickers out. Maybe it’s just the change I fear.

But there is a part of me that craves it too: the measureless. To become

an icy rock in the vacuum of space. Sound-swallowing tar. Loving

the business of the void. The simple drapery over your father’s casket.

Having never enlightened. But devolved by loneliness, spitting wine over his bib 

at a heedless hour, chunks of his flesh spanning out like butter in a pan

when the great meteor hits. What I will miss are the trees. Or the party

my mother made for me, where they cloaked & spun me toward a target,

placed the locus in my hand, blindfolded & pointed me at the wall, somewhere 

out there in the nothingness & laughter. What I will miss is a good cigar.

Its leaves often from three different countries, dried & aged, hung in

fat bunches in the calfrisa, cut & rolled by hand. Something different for the filler,

something for the binder, body of Christ, & the crucial, final wrapper. I like

clipping the end & lighting it under a soft flame that laps invisibly.

I like them in a winter cold those countries will never know. I like it to be 

dry as paper outside & vigilantly still so the smoke falls from my mouth, 

& I can lean back & watch as it winds through the spindly fingertips of bare 

branches amid their gathered terminus. I don’t think I can remember 

them as they were, but there was a pleasure in putting the clouds in the sky, 

one at a time. Then an enormous scree. Those branches like the vessels

& bronchial valves of song. Milton wrote all of Paradise Lost by recitation 

after going blind. He held that each night, an angel would visit his dreams 

to provide “instruction.” The following day, he merely repeated

what he was told. I sure wasn’t a Milton. Hell was yet a place

the light could not touch. I go along like all simple folk & we all

think of ourselves as solipsistic & incidental as bright-hot suns. Perhaps

if I could sleep, an angel might come, but I would never remember

what I saw. I couldn’t give up wanting to see it all again & see it new. 

Afford me this sin, that I take a good cigar into a clear, crisp twilight, 

until we rise together into night, dissipating from the sparked punk, 

stopping time, considering what was only made of leaf & smoke.

I will never think for a moment that the light will ever come again.