Life Sculpture

(20-22 January 1994) after William Croswell Doane

His father waits patiently at the bus stop morning and evening, working the day at a gas station, and lets his son take his elbow between the car and the bus, a little man steering quietly through the years between here and the darkness. The son, on his way to work, pushes himself up straight on the seat at the front of the bus, pulls out his oddly bound volume and draws his fingers for a while across raised dots, with a little smile, a facial twitch. He listens from tiny earphones, the wires looping from his ears into his open satchel where he has carefully tucked his folded white cane. Neatness in all, feeling his things in their places, straightening hairs on his forehead, adjusting on his ears the glasses he can’t see much through, only a dull red light at day or, at night, only darkness, he sits calmly, and he never looks down.