Today I read a poem
that asked what the ocean is
to a blind man.

How must it feel?
To swim in a body
so vast to me or you,
but without scope to him,
for everything is vast
and everything is not
when the whole world
is infinite and black

How must it feel?
Perhaps like a slow, and
gentle burial, a death
full of grace, or maybe
a glimpse of sight,
cold and clear and blue
(whatever blue is to a blind man)
a gracious gift from a rolling,
heaving, exhilarated God.

But perhaps the ocean is,
to a blind man,
no more than to me or you:
relief, a watery thrill and
a weightless, bodiless taunt
to death’s stark certainty,
within which we play.

Or maybe it is more.
What if, to a blind man,
the ocean is everything?
What if it is his soul,
and the earth’s soul, and
his history entire, roaring
in his ears as he submerges
and imagines what he might see:
fish and weeds and his parents
and his own death

(but how can he picture these things,
I ask?
Surely a blind man
must imagine what the world
looks like instead of sounds like,
or feels like, or smells like)

What must all these words mean
to a blind man? For surely
they are different
than what they mean to me
or to you.

What is the ocean to a blind man?
I ask this, but instead
I find myself wondering:
what is a poem to me?