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.
“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
Tobi Kassim
Tobi Kassim is the recipient of the Sean T. Lannan Poetry Prize from Yale University, as well as an Undocupoets Fellowship. He lives in New Haven, on Quinnipiac land.