Ghost Vision
Contributor’s Marginalia: Dorianne Laux on “On Blindness” by Kwame Dawes
Kwame Dawes poem, “On Blindness”, caught my eye. What reader of books, what writer of poetry—lover of color, shape, contour, the sharp shadows light chisels, the spectacle of the seen world—doesn’t fear the loss of sight? It is one thing to have it snatched from us unceremoniously, unforeseen, some accident that suddenly cancels our eyes. But to know it is coming, passed down from grandparent to parent to son, each familial lamp going dim, waiting your turn on genetics’ blurred wheel of blindness, must be excruciating. And yet, amid the depression, the moments in this poem that ring most emotionally true are the grandfather rinsing his fingers in a bowl of water “… before, / before, before feeling for the lips and eyes / of the grandchild, amazed at the intimacy / of sightlessness, the substances of the dark…” And “Mama, in your closing / shadows, waiting for a sound of silence, / how deep inside your blood you live…” I was also struck by the final words of each couplet, and how they shape another grouping of ghost “visions”:
gloom shadows
comfort knows
edges dying
litany 1940
valley calling
before eyes
intimacy dark
closing silence
live depression
forgotten night
red September
Nebraska sky
The flickering tail of each line a visual echo, a second sight.
Dorianne Laux’s most recent collections are The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Facts about the Moon, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, and Smoke from BOA Editions. Only As The Day Is Long: New and Selected, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University and is founding faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program. Only As The Day Is Long: New and Selected, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in January, 2019.