Talking To the Blind About Colors
By Jane McKinley
November 15, 2024
November 15, 2024
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That night I was playing another Messiah
with a maestro wielding a massive baton, prodding us on to ever faster tempi, as if speed were next to godliness in this white marble cavern. It's cold-- so cold the soloists wear coats between their arias, slipping them off as they rise to sing, except for the alto. Her shoulder- blades express a language of their own: Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart.
You were dancing the last time I saw you, dipping and twirling on your fake foot at our nephew's wedding, wearing a dress you'd spent weeks searching for: backless, black silk with hot pink flowers, long enough to hide your prosthesis. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. I never imagined you walking in darkness.
You were too sure of where you were going, knew the floorplans of houses after a single walk-through, the layout of streets, crosswalks, the precise location of every pothole, each crack in the sidewalk. When you fell down a manhole, you thought you had died and gone to heaven, but a voice called out from above, and you were convinced you'd gone to hell, but that was years ago. You believed in living. In color. In searching
for the perfect shade of crisp off-white for the comforter in your guest room. Kamienska wrote: Talking to the blind about colors. Take my word for it. You told me about your first date with Tom, how, without being asked, he described the night sky. The last time we spoke on the phone, two days ago now, you told me how impressed the saleswomen were when he riffed on the various shades of red so you'd know which sweater to choose. (You had no idea you'd wear it forever.) Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not
all sleep, but we shall all be changed. You fell into sleep, your little dog Bella curled up at your side and Tom's faithful lab at the foot of the bed. Tom told us he kissed you good night. Did you see a great light? Feel your cells shutting down? Or dream of things you wouldn't live to tell? Or is it the way Kamienska described it: not a gateway to the next world, maybe just the opening of blind eyes. Tell me, what do you see now that you couldn't see before? Note: Except for the quotes from Anna Kamienska, all the lines in italics are from the libretto of Handel’s Messiah, which his librettist, Charles Jennens, borrowed from the King James translation of the Bible.
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Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist and founder and longtime artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble. She is the author of two poetry collections: Vanitas (Texas Tech UniversityPress, 2011), which won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize, and Mudman, forthcoming from Able Muse Press. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Five Points, The Southern Review, Baltimore Review, on Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. In 2023 she was awarded a poetry fellowship by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She has recently finished a series of poems based on the life of Bach's second wife, Anna Magdalena, three of which will appear in the spring issue of The Southern Review.
Website: janemckinley.com
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Author’s Note:
I never set out to write poetry. It just happened. A poem came to me while I was driving through the rain. The poem helped to dispel an image that had haunted me for decades: the silhouette of my eldest sister lying in a casket when I was twelve. This loss and others, including the death of my youngest sister from juvenile diabetes, inhabit the three poems here, as well as my first two collections.