Word Blindness by Rachel Moritz


 
 
In the woods the glottis trembled

red over rock, the strange markings

singular & secret, bees

would not catch them.

You were their echo, fingers tapped

for each quivered sound

& not believing this

your navigation. None of it,

scratched in playground sand,

below the trees’ bloom on cold avenues.

At night, the moon

was a blind fraction, stars

as smoke plumes

& vowels as decades & I was never

a savant but saw you late

in the strata of language.

Where snow cut its milk teeth,

your face the smallest phoneme.

Where the epoch of light & air

& bees all diminish, your pencil

writes a little wing on the d

& the b twists to kiss its mate,

they wave where

we wait in the passage of reading.

 
 
Rachel Moritz is the author of Sweet Velocity (Lost Roads Press, 2017) and Borrowed Wave (Kore Press, 2015), as well as five chapbooks of poetry. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.