Improvement

It’s that time of year, again. The time when I schedule an appointment to go to the eye doctor while I can still use the eye insurance coverage I have before the end of the year. I tend to put it off long as possible, mostly because I don’t like having people poke me in the eye, blow air in my eye, dilate my eye, or pretty much do anything to my eye. Also, let’s face it, because going to the eye doctor is usually about diminishment. It takes me back to my fourteen-year-old self who found out I had to wear glasses when I couldn’t see the chalkboard. And even worse, my math-teacher, realizing I couldn’t see from my spot at the back of the room, grabbed my desk and dragged it to the front of the class in front of everyone.  Uggh!

And now the yearly ritual marks the changes between every stage of life: the need for help seeing close, as well as far. The fluctuations that come in times of stress and times of (relative) ease. The body’s gradual––or sudden–– failings.  Once, when my annual check-up showed that my vision had actually improved (!!!) I wrote a little poem and gave it to my eye doctor. A poem of modest celebration. I include it here.

Improvement

The optometrist says my eyes 
are getting better each year. 
Soon he’ll have to lower my prescription.
What’s next? The light step I had at six? 
All the gray hairs back to brown?
Skin taut as a drum?

My improved eyes and I
walked around town and celebrated.

We took in the letters
of the marquee, the individual leaves
filling out the branches of the sycamore,
an early moon.

So much goes downhill: joints
wearing out with every mile,
the delicate folds of the eardrum
exhausted from years of listening.
I’m grateful for small victories.

The way the heart still beats time 
in the cathedral of the ribs.

And the mind, watching its parade of thoughts 
enter and leave, begins to see them 
for what they are: jugglers, fire swallowers, acrobats,
tossing their batons into the air.

And maybe you have your own modest celebrations, things that you notice have improved, or, at least, not gotten any worse! Or maybe one thing changes in a way you would have thought was worse, but it makes you notice small wonders you didn’t notice before. I’ve had that happen, too.

Someone who spends a lot of time contemplating this is photographer and writer Michael Nye, who is also the husband of poet Naomi Shihab Nye. He has a project called My Heart is Not Blind, for which he interviewed and photographed people who had lost their vision. So much heart, wisdom and unexpected beauty in this collection. From his artist’s statement: “Not all blind people are blind. Not all sighted people can see. Knowing what the world looks like is not a requirement for understanding. Over the last seven years I have been listening to men and women who are blind or visually impaired. It’s been a rare privilege to have these deep and personal conversations. My ears saw much more than my eyes.”

And if you’d like to take another moment to contemplate faculties lost and found, check out this episode of The Slowdown, where poet Major Jackson talks about his own relationship to living in a body and reads the poem.

May you embark on your own “graceful journey of living toward the body’s end” as Jackson puts it, “and celebrate along the way.”

Danusha