In the room the Russian couple sit talking
of Osip Mandelstam, whose wife wrote about hope
after hope turned to a meal of broken glass
and sawdust. Have I ever, in all these hours
in all these eye clinic waiting rooms, heard
the name of a poet?
The doctors are pleased as usual.
All the hardware is still in place: the plastic
scleral buckles, the titanium shunt,
the polymer cornea and contact lens,
even the retinal sutures, like leg-warmers
an ’80s thing. The old laser burns are causing
no trouble—really, the eyes are fine except
I cannot see with them, not even the hand
the nurse tells me she’s waving in my face. Today
she might as well be Adam Smith. Yet I always
come back. At what point do I go from dutiful
outpatient to pilgrim at a shrine?
When a parishioner was too sick to make it
to the church, they used to carry the Bambino,
pint-sized but standing tall in his little dress,
down the long stairs and bundle him into a taxi
for a house call. Maybe they still do,
though the real Bambino is gone, stolen—if anyone
knows how to fence a small god, it’s those clever
Romans: tutto sistemato. The body double
still gets heaps of letters, and I imagine
prayers are answered as they were before.
of Osip Mandelstam, whose wife wrote about hope
after hope turned to a meal of broken glass
and sawdust. Have I ever, in all these hours
in all these eye clinic waiting rooms, heard
the name of a poet?
The doctors are pleased as usual.
All the hardware is still in place: the plastic
scleral buckles, the titanium shunt,
the polymer cornea and contact lens,
even the retinal sutures, like leg-warmers
an ’80s thing. The old laser burns are causing
no trouble—really, the eyes are fine except
I cannot see with them, not even the hand
the nurse tells me she’s waving in my face. Today
she might as well be Adam Smith. Yet I always
come back. At what point do I go from dutiful
outpatient to pilgrim at a shrine?
When a parishioner was too sick to make it
to the church, they used to carry the Bambino,
pint-sized but standing tall in his little dress,
down the long stairs and bundle him into a taxi
for a house call. Maybe they still do,
though the real Bambino is gone, stolen—if anyone
knows how to fence a small god, it’s those clever
Romans: tutto sistemato. The body double
still gets heaps of letters, and I imagine
prayers are answered as they were before.
Roy White is a blind person who lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with a lovely human and an affable lab mix. His work has appeared, or is about to, in Poetry, BOAAT Journal, Baltimore Review, Tinderbox, and elsewhere.
The sighted visitor can see the replacement Bambino at Santa Maria in Aracoeli on the Capitoline hill; whether he still makes house calls I do not know
The sighted visitor can see the replacement Bambino at Santa Maria in Aracoeli on the Capitoline hill; whether he still makes house calls I do not know