Blind Toast

When Gilbert asked me to be his best man
I started writing this little toast in my head
about the National Braille Press where we all
worked, me in Transcription, Gilbert and Lisa
in Proofreading, where they fell in love among
the braille dots, reading volumes in the goosebumps,
reading love in each other’s voices. And I knew
there’d be lots of blind people at this wedding,
faces tending to the sides and to the ceiling,
heads swaying to the music of their bodies.
I pictured the white canes sticking out of the pews
or folded in the laps in red-and-white bundles
And I compared the first time I saw them kiss
(I couldn’t help staring) to two single-engine planes
coming in for a landing, zero visibility, turbulence
as they navigated the air currents and crosswinds
that separated them, touching down successfully
with a bump, then coming to a complete stop
which they held for a long time, like a lost
suitcase the hands believed they would never
see again. And I described how I loved to look
at their hands reading, and would often eavesdrop
over their shoulders, watching their fingers flying
like the pursed lips of the wind. And when I was done
I brailled the toast and gave it to Gilbert to read,
to run it by him before his big day. But he didn’t
like it. In fact he hated it. It was all about me—
my sensibility via his blindness, he said. The story of
his life. And he didn’t need it repeated on the day
of his wedding. And he tore it up before my eyes
and sprinkled it on the floor like so much torn-up braille.

_{Paul Hostovsky’s poems appear and disappear simultaneously (ta-da!) and have recently been sighted in those places where they pay you for your trouble with your own trouble doubled, and other people’s troubles thrown in, which never seem to him as great as his troubles, though he tries not to compare. He has no life and spends it with his poems, trying to perfect their perfect disappearances, which is the title of his newest collection, which is looking for a publisher and for itself. His disappearing poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. Website: paulhostovsky.com}