Theodore Enslin
Theodore Enslin, poet of Maine, I am closing my eyes to tune you in,
to hear your tender buttons turning inside-out toward reflections
on water, attention to stones. Yet, even though you're using a microphone,
your voice—when it follows softly on the consonantal endings—
leaks through the trough of my hearing loss. It's the same with Robert Creeley;
you and he, on the same frequency that looks like a valley on my chart.
I close my eyes and try to listen with my heart to the Steinean insistence
of your long gray beard, try to soften my long-damaged ears from inoperable
shale to pale pink petals absorbing what sun this stringent coast permits.
Sometimes, this way, I get whole phrases, only to pass through other phases
where stone and skin and soul are blurred, and words fly off like startled birds,
my eyes into a soundless sky.
Ellen McGrath Smith, "Theodore Enslin" from Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature: Vol. 13, Issue 2. Copyright © 2019 by Ellen McGrath Smith. Reprinted by permission of Ellen McGrath Smith.
Source: Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature: Vol. 13, Issue 2 (2019)