The Blind Date

by Karina Klesko


a carousel
with all those mirrors
distorting the view ,
I am too high and now too low
can't quite see myself
losing my focus
the psychedelic zebra
leads the way
and the galloping stallion,
never seem to pass me
sitting on this ostrich
hiding it's head
I slide down the neck
and a hippo behind us
breaks loose and stampedes
as I hide between the legs,

of a dromedary stocking up

on water, then takes off

carrying children
to a far off desert
at that moment I hitch
a ride on a leopard
constantly changing its spots
I fall into a circle of darkness
climbing up the quarter note
scribed by a messianic missionary
throwing in his towel
we both join an elephant pack

marching off to China, where a panda
sits and collects refuse
gears grinding an old calliope tune
pink clouds on a stick
and belgian waffles.----

left at the gate the jackal jumps the wall

Karina,

here's a poem that (to my mind) works on many levels: lyrical, symbolic and narrative. Title suggests, endearingly but with some sadness, limits imposed on poet-narrator's enjoyment of a carousel by failing eyesight. Thrill of a first meeting melds magically with a childhood experience. So what is limitation is, strikingly enough, also the poem's greatest strength, revealing as it does playground's sparkles & ''galloping" motions and a kind of adult 'ride' through lost shapes & forms.

Both ride and journey, then; a first meeting and loss. Style of poem is gracefully paratactic & pithy, with its smooth transition from distoring "mirrors" to carousel animals. It's as if 'mirrors' frame poetic vision, providing the poem's shifting & kaleidoscopic ("psychedelic") perspectives. No room here for prolonged commentary nor the usual syntactical rearranging of experiences according to priority or importance. A first-date experience, in limiting circus vision, can sense and anticipate by touch, smell and nearness animal shape, movement, destination. Note how wonderfully you've made 'circles', 'quarter notes' & messianic messages sustain a single unified experience, both imagined and lived, overwhelming but also finally liberating.

I am familiar enough with your Eastern verses to imagine here the possibility of a renku-and-free verse style marriage. Nothing but that can account for the poem's lyrical elegance &strength: particularly for its arresting irony of a first date in near-blindness.

anonymous