Like Blindfolded Children

Like Blindfolded Children

(“I was like eyes for the blind, like feet for the crippled.” Job 29:15)

I saw your face and the only thing I could think
was to ask if it was okay for me to say
that I miss you?
You weren’t the first to limp for me
when I had pretended to walk upright for years.
Studying the early morning light
was just another way to disguise my blindness.
It was no fault of my own,
and you saw none to begin with,
but I always depended on your description of
the day to remind me where love began and
rejection ended. I remember you did cartwheels
on my front lawn.

Hanging by your knees from the parallel bars
you saw me inverted; my feet had been burned from
walking on asphalt all summer. But your laugh
was July’s tune, your play like a kitten showing
how long it could hang on the living room drapes
in the sun.

We began the way that all children do;
hide-and-go-seek until it was too dark to
see the secret place in the grove of trees just
between the public park and the old tool shed
we swore was haunted. You would have carried
me on your back, but you were smaller than I was.
So you slowed your pace, and with childlike grace
that displaces adult apprehensions, you showed me
the dance floor, the gazebo, where teenagers pretended to be
married
by the neighbor next door.

Do I know your face? How can you ask? Though years
have stubbornly kept us apart like continental drift,
your laugh is as young as the last day of summer
50 years ago.

There is a grandmother here in town (we are both now
grands, can you believe it?) There is a grandmother in town
who entertains every visitor that sits on her couch and
every baby placed upon her lap.

How old shall we be before we can play again
like blindfolded children swinging at a pinata?
How far we have come, how near do I believe you to be,
(though my thoughts often deceive me.) How long until
we walk a dusky evening with nothing more than
a bunch of grapes and roll down the hill until
our jeans are grass-stained with the imprints of impossibility?
I could see more easily when you were there to guide me.