Before Raymond Carver Poem by Desmond Kon

The apple is first rolled across the floor, bounced, bruised
like her forehead, like her small brown tired eye. The apple tosses, itself
a tennis ball, against all four walls – still she thinks it’s the parrot
out of its cage, out all four walls. When it finally dribbles to land
against her shoe, a knob, soft knock, she thinks it the rain and how
it moves to a stop, the way she only wished of her every day.

These days, it’s all been about apples, and sometimes oranges the
rest of the time.

“This is what an apple feels like, Helen.”

“This is what an apple smells like, Helen.”

“This is what, Helen, an apple tastes like….”

There’s saliva all over the apple now, like her tongue, the wallpaper
she’s wrapped around her waist like a wedding lehnga, its train
like a red carpet, the labrador chewing on its tuareg patterns.
These pictures too would speak magenta parables for Helen,
figural, scrungy hyperbole unloosed.

Repeating a name doesn’t make it ring true, a troika sans Russian
horses, triune but its menorah flames never meeting.

Repeating a name doesn’t dwarf the metaphors that already glut
her mind, excessive, cataractal.

In an instant, she’ll know knowledge, what it looks like, and the
differences that exist within it, room against room, pane watching pane,
the air before and after the honeymoon rain.

“But I wanted the apple on the table, ” she says, dealing her cards,
her mannish hands, her three of hearts. “I wanted it as it always was.”





Author’s Note:

Originally titled “Helen Keller’s Three Days to See (understudying Russell Edson) ”, this piece is the first of three parts published in Harpur Palate, Binghamton University’s literary journal. The second and third segments, which appropriate Carver’s Cathedral and C. S. Lewis’ Man Born Blind, loosely work off and within the writing styles of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin.

In her classic essay, “Three Days to See”, published in Atlantic Monthly (January,1933) , Keller lists all the things she would have wanted to do had she three days to see. On her second day, which she devoted to “a hasty glimpse of the world, past and present”, she wished to visit the Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “If I were the president of a university, ” Keller writes early in her essay, “I should establish a compulsory course in ‘How to Use Your Eyes’. The professor would try to show his pupils how they could add joy to their lives by really seeing what passes unnoticed before them.” She concludes her essay with these words of advice: “I who am blind can give one hint to those who see – one admonition to those who would make full use of the gift of sight: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind…. Make the most of every sense; glory in all the facets of pleasure and beauty which the world reveals to you through the several means of contact which Nature provides. But of all the senses, I am sure that sight must be the most delightful.”

In C. S. Lewis’ The Dark Tower and Other Stories (New York: Harvest Books,2002) is the short story, “The Man Born Blind”, which explores the perspective of a blind man who regains his sight. The man is obsessive in his pursuit to “see” light. When Walter Hooper compiled Lewis’ unpublished manuscripts for this book in 1977, “The Man Born Blind” had never been seen by anyone during the author’s lifetime except Owen Barfield and possibly J. R. R. Tolkien. Barfield explains that the story was written during the late 1920s when he and Lewis obsessed over the Great War debate over appearance and reality which Lewis refers to in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. The idea is taken a bit further in Lewis’ essay, Meditation in a Toolshed, in which he discusses the fatal modern habit of always looking at things, such as a beam of light, rather than not only at them but along them to the objects which they illuminate.

The longest section of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is titled “The Fire Sermon”, in which Eliot repeats the phrase “burning, burning, burning”, a direct reference to the same-titled Buddhist text where the Buddha exhorts his disciples to give up earthly desires. In the book, The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, edited by Michael North (New York: W.W. Norton,2001) is mentioned how the speaker, seen in the androgynous Tiresias, is blind but able to see with a great lucidity, yet does not hope nor act because of his ennui and pragmatism. Unable to escape, he is required to sit and witness the waste of the land; and no matter how much he wishes to die, he cannot.