Blindsight

Greg Hewett

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781566894487
• eBook ISBN: 9781566894623
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Praise for Greg Hewett:

2010 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Poetry

2003 Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry Winner

In poems that are full of wit, touching, and introspective, as well as formally inventive, we find the poet losing his sight, becoming a parent, and occupying middle age with a sense of calm and inevitability.

From "Skyglow":

we spin filaments of light into profiles,
drawing each other
through something resembling time and space and dark.
Let's call this something something vague and mythic
as the ether. Let's say we're ethereal.

IV. P.O.V.

The Drowning

It comes like a thought,

the figure rising to the lake’s calm surface

indistinct as an angel.

The public gathers onshore

reflecting

on what has transpired, on what is transcending.

Either you recognize yourself or you don’t.

There’s no way to know

a life by examining

its features; the facts

skip like stones across

the surface, then sink.

They’ll do the ID,

though that’s not the idea

of someone, the idea

one has of one’s self

beyond all identity,

one’s self to oneself, that place

where clarity disappears.

Instructions for Forgetting

There is a word I can’t remember for forgetting

who I am, for erasing

all those guideposts that every moment bring us

back to the garage of who we think we are,

the inner

monologue building up slowly, discreetly, like carbon monoxide.

Not amnesia. It’s more intentional than that.

Every brain ought to

come with special emergency instructions:

buy a last-minute ticket to anyplace

you’ve never heard of;

discard all electronic devices, credit cards;

buy a new wardrobe;

on arrival, be sure the city reads like

a journal unlike your own;

excise your name and picture from your passport

and leave it on a park bench;

destroy photos; remember,

landscape is harder to forget than people;

now find a hotel, someplace

anonymous (apartments

become us too easily);

avoid grand boulevards with memorials

to the knowns or the unknowns;

don’t learn the local language;

visit museums with collections that interest you

not in the least (farm implements, ceramic

tile ovens, a whole mansion of op art);

on the outskirts, visit battlefields of wars

that never became history; see ruins;

wander train stations;

don’t buy a ticket;

eat at lunch counters;

frequent neighborhoods

where those as foreign as you

have begun to forget where

they came from, what they came for.

Self-Portrait as Greek Hero

The bronze helmet fits so I wear it, liking its shiny defiance.

A visor obscures the fear encamped in my features.

An army of bright chariots, photons pour into my eyes and die,

lending epic valor and violence to my well-fortified glare.

Visitors to the exhibit almost believe I’m a demigod,

but then detect the wristwatch I forgot to take off.

Illusion in ruins, the weapons of loneliness now glint all around me.

Self-Portrait as Heartbroken Prom Queen, circa 1967

Even for old guys like me, the look’s the easy part:

prosthetics, wig, vintage clothes, an hour with Photoshop.

The mussed beehive does the trick.

It’s the once-upon-a-time-

I-was-my-daddy’s-princess-but-now-nothing-matters

feeling that’s tough to master:

I fall onto a retro champagne-satin bedspread,

eyes wide-open like a girl

murdered in the woods at night, imagining

the harvest-gold rotary phone won’t ring no matter how much I swear to God

I will never ever act like such a bitch again.

TV-light reflecting off my unwashed face says that vocab word abjection like nothing else.

In the deep-focus background there’s a picture of me and him at winter prom

—him an absence in black—me a swirl of white,

a regular snow queen, holding red roses.

At a distance it looks like I’ve been slashed wide open,

but really I’m so happy as they hand me my crown.

It’s tough work being me, she and I decide with a sigh and a yawn.

Whether it is drama or trauma is hard

for anyone to know. We search the mirror

as we’re falling asleep, dreaming of future losses.

By the time I wake up I am a glittering mess.

Wig fallen off, rhinestones biting into my bald crown, and a suspicion that the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Approaching Blindness
• I. Number Blind
• II. Scenes
• III. Mind’s Eye
• IV. P.O.V.
• V. Spectacle
• Notes
• Funder Acknowledgments
• The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press
• About the Author