John Fry: [yes I witnessed the blind man]
continuing, the pilgrim said, this matter matters.
such a delicate raiment, flesh.
& this shrine, no more Tepeyac than Lourdes.
yet each snag from wear, every fray, fingered.
particulars differ but suffering's sum the same.
young, old—no difference—woman, man.
& of indeterminate sex, I'm not sure which, thin or thick of skin.
who might as well have been Tiresias.
not until unknowing swallowed my sight in its clouds.
if a heart can have eyes, how much clearer the hands.
walls of water fallen white are called cataracts for a reason.
lips too can read the body's variable Braille.
child, I saw that the wages of sin is birth.
[there’s a catalogue of frequently absent hours]
not Advent yet though, already, a bit of blood sunrisen in, on, an.
tree limbs the burnt ends of pencils left by a larger someone to hold horizon's opposite.
were there any to hope from, I would've lifted my eyes to the hills.
an hour's drive from the so-called country doesn't mean there are, save buildings.
late payment notices flapping, filling the apartmental surround, no help come.
wages of work: khaki slacks without end, two cigarette breaks, a lunch leftover from yesterday's culinary disaster, prepackaged heartburn for dessert, hairshirt of a beard I keep forgetting to shave off.
handful of words creek-gathered stones, & two might or might not be flint.
if there's a figure of speech—for the ellipsis under the tongue—daylight hasn't deciphered it.
disjecta membra: might as well mean dejected membrane.
will today, for example, be when (unasked) the beloved comes.
because he wanted to.
(how an envelope aches to be slit open after being tongued shut.)
minutes migrate with the monarchs south while the wings of the hapless stainglass windshields from San Antonio de Bexar to Brownsville.
others, like Hitchcock birds, hover in every direction power lines grid.
& dusk gutters on something about pasture, as if sleep were.
where unshod, a horse is galloping, blind.
[where underbrush is just story, fabulous tinder]
because to ask is often bad but to answer is, sometimes, worse.
if scars are bad, flesh-memory's worse.
as sorrow is bad, soiled is worse.
when haunting, bad—but haunted, worse.
because the gloaming is bad but late afternoon light is worse.
if three denials were bad, the brush of Judas's lips, worse.
as unknowing is bad, knowing is worse.
when wild is bad, wilderness is worse.
because weird is bad, queer is worse.
if apostasy's bad, heresy's worse.
as wonder is bad but wander, worse.
when confession's bad, but confessing is worse.
because boyhood is bad, when a boy wants to be a girl—
JOHN FRY's poems
appear or are forthcoming in West Branch, Colorado Review, Blackbird,
and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. He is the author of the chapbook silt
will swirl (NewBorder, 2012). A graduate of Texas State University's MFA program,
he edits poetry for Newfound Journal and is a PhD student at the University of
Texas at Austin, where he studies medieval and early modern English literature.
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