Michael Northen

MATH INSTRUCTOR

He wheels in using his one good hand
propelling with his working foot
two days growth of nettle on his face
sweat pants halfway down his bare right thigh.
His face holds no sign of charity.
Croaking algabrese he writes equations
demanding answers a second time
when half-deaf he does not hear
their shy first half-replies.
Only their own wheelchairs
keep the class from bolting
this cave of senseless deciduations.
Light from behind shines
On the dry erase board
As his raw voice beats their silence,
Is it only he that sees
in his crabbed writing,
euclidean elegance?
How can they miss it
the only gift he has to give them
a glimpse at the eternal beauty of form?

***

MACULAR DEGENERATION

My mother says her vision is getting worse.
She listens to the ballgames on the radio now.
On TV, even the pitcher is a blur.
And she will go through the day fearing
that half of her breakfast is still on her shirt.
She insists on thicker glasses
but no change in prescription will keep
the macula from its slow degeneration,
the loss of focus that creeps out
from the center.

I think it may be happening to me too.
The pop of flashbulb lights
before my eyes have grown in frequency.
I know my vision is not what it was once
when I ran the San Diego canyons
hunting toads and trapdoor spiders
staring out over the manzanita at a sky
blue beyond belief
or when draft cards burning
we stormed across the Brooklyn Bridge
singing against discrimination and a war.

Everywhere there are men
with dark glasses and mace
aiming for the center of our eyes
leaving in the periphery
a land laced in
the barbed wire of security.
What I fear is not the gauziness of vision
when the field films over like an impressionist dream.
It is the other, the inability to make distinctions
to see the details, fine lines, nuances,
and the growing paranoia that comes with it,
that everything is dark that is not light.

Michael Northen is the editor of Wordgathering and the coordinator of the Inglis House Poetry Workshop for thirteen years. With poets Sheila Black and Jennifer Bartlett, he edited the anthology Beauty is A Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos, 2011). The poems above are from his chapbook, Seconds.