THE COMING OF BLINDNESS

                                                                                    People become faces, the

                                                                                    Books had no illustrations,

                                                                                    I couldn’t see myself in the

                                                                                    Looking glass.

                                                                                                Jorge Luis Borges

Like blindness, losing each other was gradual

The petals of the white lilacs

Fell softly, vanished

And you held me at arms length

Like newsprint.

The streetlights wore haloes

Of martyrs.

There was a blankness

In the center of making love.

I no longer

Believed our bodies could

Solve equations of loss. We disengaged

To argue over coffee.

Every remark led

To a stupid argument the way

Failing sight makes a man

Stumble over thresholds.

If we had learned Braille,

The language of feeling,

Would anything be different?

Borges says black and red

Are the first colors to be dismissed,

Colors of drama, passion,

Deadly games of challenge.

The blind live

In a luminous greenish mist,

A sort of confusion and grief,

Like this, like this.

Interim