I've reached the age of needing grandpa strings for my glasses. I can't read anything within my arms' reach while wearing my glasses so I can go hours without wearing them, and if I took them off then moved from where I started reading it often takes me five blind minutes to find them. This getting old shit. Fine metaphors abound. Here's my right eye
Reading is physically harder now that my left eye can barely see through glaucoma's fog: three weeks from today it will have knives jabbed into it to try and dissipate some of the fog then stop fog's counterattack (plus eyedoc will yoink-out the old windshield and install a new one). Insurance will cover all but the deductible says eyedoc's office manager. Takes ten minutes and I'll feel zero nada no pain, says eyedoc. We'll, um, see.
But I read fine, as in I can pick up a book and see and read the text in it, engage with it. I'm reading well, as in I'm enjoying reading and retaining and thinking about what I've just read. The issue, after six decades of reading: I can't finish a novel. I set a pace that matches my interest and enjoy processing what I've read and am eager to pick it up again when I next have a minute's chance, and then I'll end a chapter or turn a page and of a sudden, SCREECH! I not only don't want to read the book in that moment, I don't to read it, viscerally, since: as I type this sentence I can't imagine me finishing any of the novels. Fine metaphors abound. Here's my left eye
It doesn't seem connected to any particular catalyst or spastic reaction to that particular day's most clussterfuckic obscenity, though no doubt Cumulative Clusterfuckic Trauma accounts for part, and that's the true clusterfuckic obscenity. And it's not just reading: I mentioned here before how certain musicians and bands that once got constant playtime in my ears and head I viscerally don't want to listen to in my ears and, especially, in my head right now. Two poets (not Ashbery, though I say something catty about *Breezeway* at the bottom of the grid below). One restaurant. A certain road in Michigan (Waterloo-Munith), the fuck did that road do to me. My home disc golf course, the one with the sign on 22 that says it is sponsored by me and Seat Six. But every novel the current ongoing eternity. I was 7/8ths through loving Faulkner's *The Hamlet* yesterday when SCREECH! BURN! Fine metaphors abound. Terry Hall would have been 67 today, this is one of my dozen favorite songs ever, still!
TAPESTRY
John Ashbery
It is difficult to seperate the tapestry
from the room or loom which takes precedence over it.
For it must always be frontal yet to one side.
It insists on this picture of "history"
in the making, because there is no way out of the punishment
it proposes: sight blinded by sunlight.
The seeing taken in with what is seen
in an explosion of sudden awareness of its formal splendor.
The eyesight, seen as inner,
registers over the impact of itself
receiving phenomena, and in so doing
draws an outline, or a blueprint,
of what was just there: dead on the line.
If it has the form of a blanket, that is because
we are eager, all the same, to be wound in it:
This must be the good of not experiencing it.
But in some other life, which the blanket depicts anyway,
the citizens hold sweet commerce with one another
and pinch the fruit unpestered, as they will,
and words go crying after themselves, leaving the dream
upended in a puddle somewhere
as though "dead" were just another adjective.
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