Lance Larsen
Where the Great Blind Poet Passed
In the snapshot I swiped from Special Collections, two youngish profs stroll the quad in 1976, raffish in their leisure suits, lapels wide as mud flaps—and between them, Borges! How mandarin he looks in smoky tweed, this tortoise of light, this bon vivant of bent time. And no one to interpret him but me. Three days a week I pass the spot, snow deep as footnotes, my breath pluming away like disappearing ink. Who cares that forty years have passed since his campus visit? The spot never changes. It changes second by second. None of his fictions mention me, but soon, very soon! Think of me as his amanuensis, the phantom estuary up north in which scholars will one day wade. If the right biographer begs, I’ll flash her the snapshot, then lead her like a seeing-eye dog. If she recites the right three lines, we’ll kneel together, hold hands, and kiss the cold cement, the very spot that matches this photo, parting students the way Moses divided waves. What fiery paths will fork? What time-space continuum will we tear, libraries breeding libraries? What doppelgängers will haunt our days? Three days a week where the great blind poet passed, I pause. I close my eyes. Oh tender translator and burning sphinx, ladies’ man who lived with his mom! After a stride or two of blindness, I’m bright as Milton and ready to go toe to toe with any Borges aficionado. “Move down the road: my abyss fueled by Borges.” “Honk if you love Pierre Menard!” And three days a week Borges tsks-tsks my zeal: “Don’t threaten me with immortality! I like being dead.”
Ladder Poem
Knots in a vine, steps hacked into a cliff face, Rapunzel’s exquisite snarls. Aren’t we always improvising ladders? Sometimes like King Kong ascending with something squirmy and beautiful in hand, sometimes like Jacob who had a bone to pick with God so spun rungs of desperation out of air. A good stepladder has an element of worship to it, unfolding like a metallic praying mantis and pointing its climber to the sky. Lay a ladder over a chasm, you have a bridge. Clocks are a ladder we lean against tomorrow today. Even instinct is a ladder. When like a Goth invader do you throw a grappling hook and climb into a hail of arrows? When like the Anasazi do you pull your stairs up after? Once, in Red Wing, weeks without the one I love, I dreamed I was a fish ladder, ragged salmon passing through my dark waters. We surged, me sliding towards the sea, those scrappy swimmers hurrying to their death gardens upstream. Where we touched was a rill of red, a slippery empathy of fin and wimpling river no evolutionist has a name for. What is a honeymoon but an attempt to ladder pleasure, and a dab of DNA, into the future?
Translation 101
Forgive me, Love, meaning my mouth is a misfiring dictionary, meaning I’m as lonely as a pocket mirror. Meaning fog is our ten-day forecast, and your silence my only Baedeker. Let my body be the tarmac, never mind the wind, crash land at will. Meaning I don’t care if your landing gear is up or down, let us leave burn marks that will distract the stars.