A woman approached me seriously but outside my home
and all context. She asked if I was a poet without telling me
she had been a previous neighbour of Jim Tate’s. I replied,
“Being a poet often requires one to be predictable, reliable,
neither of which I can claim to be, but I do wear glasses.”

An innocent passerby asked if I had a stigmatism. I think
I he said stigmata and we experience a personal ecclesiastical schism.
The neighbour of previousness mentions I’m wearing a pair of glasses
as well as carrying two more in the neck of my T-shirt.
She says, you may also be hiding another pair in a carrying case
you’re carrying in your briefcase, but that’s pure conjecture.

I reply, indeed, I do have many glasses, how did you know? You probably
think a poet might have different glasses for separate and unique visions,
as if they were magic or merely super scientific like an early cartoon hero
might wear, maybe Dr. Destructo, or Major Oblivion, but they’re not,
they’re only glasses to see through, sight and eyeglasses being nearly fungible
because we may or may not have one, and you have to work to possess
the other, which would make them interchangeable or so I might
tell myself if it’s dark, I’d say, “One is just like the other in the dark.”
I told them that because it was something either one might want to know,
because who knows? Maybe they were undercover cops.

I neglected to tell her, the innocent passerby, anyone who might listen,
I have so many glasses I put one upon the other so I may observe
the particular and the minute, the descent from universal to singular,
though not in that order, and yes, I know James Tate the poet lived,
loved, wrote daily, died, which doesn’t seem a high price to pay for
being a poet, but I understand he was ill for a while. So it goes.
My glasses tell the story. I do see clearly despite this
mix-up, which I failed to explain, probably because
I was flattered. I could go on but that’s all I got.