YOUR MOVE

“No modern poem was ever as obscure as Miss Sullivan’s naming water water for Helen Keller.” – Walker Percy

When a bear hears ice crack he doesn’t listen,

He moves. He doesn’t think water or know it

And never begins articulating ice. He

Redistributes his weight one way or another.

Cold and wet he feels; of water he knows nothing.

Yet in that seam of ice he hears an Arctic chord.

At the end of a New York novel a man

Trades sunglasses for bread. Helen Keller

Began with water. So she knew it for the first time

After feeling it in her hands a thousand, blind

And deaf, but understanding that water means

And translating at last what the feeling meant.

The sunglasses? A pair of designer shades

Almost weightless in his hand that he barters

For bread, kneeling and tasting, trying to learn.

— Lawrence Dugan