A Fable About Two Existences Found on Page Fifteen

She used to pray to something,
but no one cared, or cared to notice.

They just clapped their hands and sang
to a makeshift papier-mâché dummy on the stage.

It seemed the thing to do in that hour of forced jubilation.
The blind boy in the farthest seat from the fire escape

eyed her in suffocation. He could still see.
His handicap simply internalized everything.

He once knew her and the secret phrase
she hid inside her left stocking.

He knew it frightenly too well. It was too fragile to wave in the air.
She knew him too, and what he saw in his daily darkness

and when he fell asleep. If he fell asleep.
She thought him better off than the walking man

whose vision misses the flower that suddenly opens
in the uncanny presence of a hailstorm.

It was almost too much for them both –
the rope that shackled their ankles to charcoal black dew.

So they pretended not to care, but they noticed it
like their lives depended on it.