Nancy Scott

BLAME "RADIO TIMES" AND POETRY MONTH

I nicked my right index fingertip
on a Diet Pepsi can.
I click-hissed the top, poured, rinsed
and trashed the unsuspected metal.

I slit my Braille-reading finger,
my dot-four writing finger,
my computer line-break finger,
my phone-dialing finger.

Past monthly courses and curses,
I am now thin-skinned.
This is not the moon's doing
or an absence of sacrifice or dream;

just an accident of the mundane
with lickable salt and dashed-after paper towels
while listening to someone else's poems about
imagined owls and not writing "I love you" sonnets
and the power in weakness.

Has it dripped onto glass or shirt or carpet or radio?
What was I doing before I felt wetness?
Will my Friday sighted driver scold dots of red?
Will a passing neighbor or the mailman know
I can't manage even slight cuts?
Will it stop?

I'll be unbalanced in everything I reach for
for the next twenty-four hours--
cane, keys, microwave Pyrex bowl, dish-soap--
my new disability of minute terrors.

I keep forgetting to fear opening cans.
What line or lie shredded my attention?
And why can't I find the Band-Aids?

* * *

SKUNK CLEARING*

The animals know what he seeks.
He taps his foot
to alert the skunk;
he wants to track asteroids.
Rural bushes rustle;
he is allowed to stay.

He finds the light past cities,
past mourning,
whose beam of patience
never breaks, past muddy
milky-way dreams
of the someday house
with the someday
astronomer's back yard—
his page, his sky.
Focus and magnify.

For now, he packs the car,
drives four miles,
dances telescope angles
in Forks Township woods,
plots findings and farewells to fifty
and the astronomer's certificate.

"Hermantaria," he whispers
as he logs that elusive
asteroid in his journal.
"New Mexico," murmurs
the eastern Pennsylvania wind
or the skunk.

Originally published in Scott's book Leveling the Spin.

Nancy Scott, Easton PA, is an essayist and poet. Her over-480 bylines have appeared in magazines, literary journals, anthologies and newspapers, and as audio commentaries. Her recent work has appeared in Kaleidoscope, The Lutheran Journal, The Sun, and Behind Our Eyes anthology. She received First Prize in the 2009 International Onkyo Braille Contest