Roy White

Poetry

Roy White is a blind person who lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with a lovely woman and a handsome lab mix. His work has appeared, or is about to, in BOAAT Journal, American Journal of Poetry, Tinderbox, and elsewhere, and he blogs at lippenheimer.wordpress.com.

 

Correspondences

The fur is still smooth
as a clarinet or a rainbow
jumper. The lumps, though,

are unsettling, a veiled threat
spelled out in giant braille.

The vet says they won’t kill him,
but something will: him,
and Shelley, and me. I wouldn’t mind

going first, in a quick plane crash
or modest nuclear strike.


Some perfumes, says Baudelaire,
a trifle ghoulishly, are tender
as baby-flesh. His faith

in mystic bonds between the senses
is one I do not share. Still,

if your fingers were as sharp
as a dog’s nose, you could listen
to a record just by feeling

the grooves. This poem
reaches you, I imagine,

through your eyes; for me
it’s sound in my head, then touch
of fingertips on keys.

Words in every sense make up
the forest that holds us

in its familiar gaze: blurred sun,
false double, deep mirrors,
sweet native tongue.
Listen: