Planet of the Blind

Old Song

 

Leadbelly on the hifi--

Good morning blues

Clean nowhere in mind--death after death

And all before breakfast. Didn't I love enough Lord

To have an ounce of hope? The old singer had

Grasshoppers in his pillow, crickets in

His milk. One drinks his hope that way

Eh Meester Jesus? Just push the bugs around

With your tongue.

 

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Team Talk with Guide Dog

Now a team we had to learn how to talk to each other. Pet owners think you talk to dogs like they’re small humans. And in truth dogs do like to be praised. But when a dog is your team mate you talk to her in a different way.  This talking is an acquired art; a whole body art. In an odd way, this communication between blind handler and guide dog is akin to what some of my autistic friends have experienced. Words are visceral, tremble in air, have colors in your mind, are influenced by instincts. I thought “left” and Corky turned left and I never said the word. Did I turn ever so slightly? Was my girl able to detect the slightest postural shift in me? Maybe? Maybe. But sometimes there was no shift at all. I practiced this. I thought left and made no apparent movement and Corky without a hitch, smooth as an automatic transmission, shifted. We were talking with our respective nervous systems. Even now, ten years after her passing we are still talking. I don’t feel the need to explain this. You’ll have to trust me about the matter. Left. 

What's Your Dog's Name? Blaise Pascal

I’ve been thinking a lot about team work lately. When I was a child they wouldn’t let me play sports owing to my blindness. This made sense when the only games for kids were baseball and basketball. But somehow the physical education instructors believed it would be good for me to sit on the sidelines and so I’d daydream to the sounds of sneakers on wood floors or the vaguely pastoral whispers of baseball. I did a lot of daydreaming. It was easy because no one talked to me. Talking was reserved for those who were in the game and I was for all intents and purposes in Valhalla. The truth is I never had a team experience, never had camaraderie, reliance, the sense that somehow someone had my back. Never had someone who made me better because he or she was there. This quality of unsporting isolation in childhood was the most painful thing about being blind. When I recollect the isolation and enforced solitudes of boyhood I see how my first guide dog not only gave me confidence in traffic--she also gave me the first sense of being on a team. We might only have been a team of two, but we were a powerful and mobile team and yes, we had each other’s backs. Corky dog brought me this spirited physical and emotional bond that had always been missing from my life. Dogs are teamsters through and through. 

 

Everyone knows that in a team sport you can’t win without others. I saw this for the first time when Corky and I were crossing Columbus Circle in Manhattan. From a traffic standpoint the area is a nightmare. It’s a lethal circus of combined avenues and cross streets, the traffic moving so fast it makes a zithing sound. We plunged together into the maelstrom with her good judgment and my faith in her. I once tried to describe the moment when we left the sidewalk’s safety there on the upper westside of Manhattan as embracing the emptiness between stars. Now that’s teamwork. “Who is your team mate?” “Blaise Pascal.”

Dad and the Dogs

When my father sang small birds passed out. The man, as they say, had a tin ear. But his joy was marvelous and the dogs loved his shenanigans. I can still see him now, making the crockery jump.

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Ode to Jarkko Laine, Elegy Also

 

Here in the mountains where the birds shiver

And across the lake a woman beats a rock

With an oar and clouds rear up like horses

I take pleasure in the absurd life inside us.

I remember you lived on "big ditch road"

A homely name--O home sweet home--

Let's climb down into the hole of domesticity,

Women and children first, books and dishes,

Maybe a set of knives and a radio.

I want to be a liaison of sorts to the court of things,

A poet's job, sorting the leftovers,

Making the emptiness sing.

I don't know how to say goodbye

But I can play my harmonica in the dirty places

Like any man inside a man.

 

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Dog Agogo

Little dog's tail is like a spaghetti floor mop, upright and waving as we walk the circle in our neighborhood. Silly guy! Perfect!

The Dog Deal

Little dog and big one pull apart a rubber toy as I write. Later they’ll carry away pieces of the thing hiding them under arm chairs and in closets. Little dog is a rescue guy, part Lhasa Apso and something else though we don’t know what. He resembles a small sheep dog, black and white with long dreadlocks falling in his face.  He smiles a lot--that little dog smile that’s both affirming and vaguely naughty. 

 

Big dog is Nira, 2N2206--my guide dog. She’s a Yellow Labrador. Some people call them “golden Labs” but there’s no such thing. She’s the color of excellent French pastry--part honey and half of cream. And she’s big for a girl dog. When I’m out in public  strangers think she’s a boy. All my guide dogs have had huge frames and generous heads. Nira’s the possessor of a sweet face and beautiful, kindly chestnut eyes and of course those trademark floppy Lab ears that rise like sails when she’s excited about something. Right now she’s excited about little dog whose name is Harley. She loves Harley because he’s a good sport as she drags him around the tile floor in my finished basement--though its more than dragging, their tug of war is the canine equivalent of Archimedes’ leverage. Nira pulls in such a way that Harley’s feet leave the floor and then she really drags him. And Harley’s legs scramble for purchase to no avail and then he’s momentarily in the air.

 

Their joy is something from the deep, blue reaches of ancient life. While I struggle with the clouds of my day they are alive in such pure play that I’m envious and reminded of the essential mystery of both joy and friendship. Dogs have friendships and live in the moment. Me? I carry a heavy green book up and down the stairs, worry about tomorrow, fear the unknown. Which of us has the better deal? The dogs of course. 

 

 

Vonnegut's Eel and Paul Ryan

What will happen when the final final rationalization for coded solipsism is absorbed by the American body politic? If Kurt Vonnegut was here he’d say that giant lamprey eels will eat Indianapolis, but let’s be serious, Mid-American gas and electric has already done that. When people speak in self-serving metaphors about other people’s losses then we have the Paul Ryan plan and the Obama “chained cpi” and other forms of heartlessness tricked out in board room codes. This is not ok. How feeble that protest sounds. But how true it remains. We now talk about letting the poor fend for themselves by suggesting they are a drag on American growth. In fact social programs allow the most vulnerable to participate in the miserable buying and selling that has taken the place of civic life. Stop supporting food stamps, medicaid, medicare, social security disability, WIC, special education, rehabilitation programs for people with disabilities--(its a long list of targets in the coded solipsism industry) then, in turn, you shut down ten thousand shops and drugstores, mini-malls, Walmarts, not to mention of course, putting people in the streets. 

 

In New York the other day I was reminiscing with a friend about the state of Grand Central Station in the 1970’s when the place was run down and filled with homeless people. Remember? That’s the Ryan plan. Forget Vonnegut’s eel. 

 

I just felt like writing these words. They remind me that I’m not a heartless man. 

 

Riding to the Airport, New York City

Hold on Yoko, Yoko hold on its gonna be alright,

You're gonna make the flight...

 

On my way to JFK in NYC, find myself thinking of John Lennon. Now I understand him as a survivor of childhood abuse, probably with PTSD. And look how humane he was able to become. The heart chakras are always there, waiting on us, supplanting the toxic. Just give chakras a chance.

How I miss Lennon, who's voice right now in this age of surveillance would be wise and witty.

How I can't stand Peter King, who, as folksinger Christine Lavin would say, is "a prisoner of his hairdo."

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Reading Poetry at 30,000 Feet

By Andrea Scarpino

 

 

A little bit of magic isn’t it, poetry, flying.

 

Ruth Stone writes:

 

​‘In August we carried the old horsehair mattress

​To the back porch

​And slept with our children in a row.

​The wind came up the mountain into the orchard

​Telling me something;

​Saying something urgent.

​I was happy.’

 

I used to be terrified of flying, would break out sweating as soon as I stepped onto the plane. My fear didn’t stop me from traveling, but it felt like a miracle every time I arrived at my destination safely. I marveled that anyone would choose to work as a pilot or flight attendant: what a crazy suicide.

 

When I grew tired of being afraid, I started reading books on flight, the inner workings of planes, the job of the pilot, the jobs of the flight crew. I read about the physics of flight, how planes launch themselves into the air, how they stay aloft, how they land. And still, I return to this: magic. I’m no longer afraid of flying, but I still think of it as magic. A little bit of miracle.

​

​‘The green apples fell on the sloping roof

​And rattled down.’

 

And poetry, also: magic. Hard work, yes, hours of dead-ends and deleted lines, stacks of discarded paper to fold into the compost bin. But sometimes, a spark, a something that launches you into the air, that moves you in a new and unexpected direction. Sometimes something magical.

 

I usually bring silly things to read while flying, magazines or popular novels, things that don’t require too much of my brain so when I lose a page to announcements or a loud seatmate, it doesn’t matter. This trip, I brought back issues of Poetry Magazine. I read Ruth Stone.

 

​‘The wind was shaking me all night long;

​Shaking me in my sleep

​Like a definition of love,

​Saying, this is the moment,

​Here, now.’

 

‘This is the moment,’ I read at 30,000 feet. And ‘I was happy.’ And ‘Here, now.’

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