Produced by Dennis Camire
This week’s poem is by Annaliese Jakimides of Bangor. The poem first appeared in “Off the Coast.”
MY OCEAN AS THE BLIND MAN SEES IT
By Annaliese Jakimides
Instinctively he turns his face up into
the thin, buttery light that lies on the back
of the sea, along the horizon he has never seen.
In his mind, there is no image against which
to measure this absence, only a sea
of nothingness: he can’t even call it
black — he doesn’t know black or red or yellow,
no pearl of sun on salt-watered ankles.
Horizons and edges, buttery light, the buoy bouncing
on the lip of a mid-swell wave — or the wave,
for that matter — are all inaccessible
to him. Well, not the wave, actually: each lick,
every beat as it reshapes, refolds, reforms
into another and another climbs inside
his ear and tunnels into labyrinths the rest of us
can’t know, too distracted by the plovers and rose hips,
the dusty crab shells in the sand, the fluorescent green kayak
a quarter-mile out. His hands play wind, his fingers rake
new scores in the air. As he composes
sheet after sheet, a transcription of sorts,
his chest beats out breath one, breath two, breath three,
exhaling the salt of Zanzibar and Honshu and Lubec he took
in only moments before, his intonation
shaped by whale vibrations, porpoise speak, eider cry.
Dennis Camire can be reached at dcamire@cmcc.edu
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