A Blind Spot, Awash

And if I give up on consequences 
is that despair  
or passion? I can’t protect  
myself from either. The lantern swinging  
bearing down, pressing the dark  
to a sliver  
of shade at the edges of my field  
of vision. My body alight in  
the seat of this question and indecisive— 
if to be moved through,
                         de-throated,  
the groove in the thoroughfare.

I felt reduced waking up 

crumpled by the water, an amniotic curve 
along the shore. My only shape
was having been carried,
left at rest. And everything
I thought I could lose—
when I followed the rushes back, resurfaced.

Wings tucked just so or grasses threaded 
gently from ear to ear, rewiring their small 
skulls. I understood the first mercy  
             of diving is blindness, those parachutes blooming
                        the drag that yanked me back 
to my body, almost touching my lungs.

Copyright © 2022 by Tobi Kassim. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 10, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast 

  

“This poem was written at a time when I rode many trains from Connecticut to D.C. The tracks pass through marshes lined with tall grasses. I often wondered what the opposite side of the safety of the train window would feel like, and this question stirred a mix of fear and desire in me. This poem is an attempt to live in the suspension between those feelings and put off resolving them. What first felt like a question about danger became an exploration of the leap of faith, or what it might mean to decide to live.”
—Tobi Kassim