gorging on joy and madness

1. 

You got light, asked the blind Slovak holding a Dublin pipe. 

He didn't care his eyes might well have been pecked by swallows and sun. 

He was from Serbia, waiting for his wife to return from the mall. 

Lifting my elbows off the dock rails, I offered to describe the scene for him:

white sails, waves, bundles of kelp.

A ponytailed crew team rowed through sunbeams.

                                            Once, a teenager had released a baby shark on a

dare, or so the locals told. The best catfish po'boy 

was not in the overpriced pavilion, but a jerry-built shack behind the palm cove.

He was kind; let me talk, ramble on.

I was far from my life on a Tuesday afternoon.

My fiancée and job and dreams an impossible collage.

                                                                 In the end, the blind man reached

to rest his hand on my bare, sunburned shoulder

while intoning through a heavy accent, I think, about life not being a museum. 

He was smiling. Maybe it was the sun.

2.

Each body is an ark. We store enough

clarity and obfuscation to survive. Stowaways be warned. 

From the gathering dead that you will remember at least once a day until

        you die—immediate family, old friends, lovers—eventually all memories

coalesce and, as the Greeks depicted, soon

only brine and slippery seaweed surround.

3.

The old Slovak had slaved for decades in radio production: folk and classical

        music, then Communist Party public service announcements, then Fiat

        and Marlboro commercials after the Velvet revolution.

Now retired, on his third honeymoon—after his high-school sweetheart wife

left to open a garden shop in Tel Aviv; followed by a platinum-maned trophy

Pole who took the remainder of his investments when his sight ate itself.

But we always get by.

Eventually, the blind man's newest bride arrived, clicking planks with her cane.

Whiter haired than he, she was stooped in pink sneakers and carried a grin

        of bemusement.

This is my new friend, Edvard, he announced, and I took her soft, wavering hand.

The saltwater taffy and beef jerky she shared from the purchases for their 

        various grandchildren piqued my thirst. The chocolate in your country 

        unsound,

he translated for me after she giggled a snatch of Slovak to him.

Different, she corrected. Sweet, very plain. Cupping an expensive camera

with two hands, she asked, You make, please?

They were a mess. Twist-mouthed and melted irises. 

Bodies and oversized collars run over by the tractor of time.

Gorging on joy and madness, camped out alone together in a blank, windy 

        wilderness

buried impervious inside the sun.

 

I watched their pure delight disappear down the auburn shoreline long

until the ember of my own insignificance began to glow.

4.

Life is like photography. We develop from negatives.—Unknown

[Ed Bok Lee, 'Portrait of a Blind Couple Reverberating', from Mitochondrial Night]