For fifty-five years, Borges slowly went blind,
losing first grey and green, the small fonts, the leaf’s
network of veins, then the difference between cerulean
and sapphire, between Chianti and claret. In the end,
it was every edition of Shakespeare, love looks not with eyes,
winged Cupid’s painted blind. Five years later, everything
black, Borges said, I’d always imagined that paradise
would resemble a library. No one asked, What, abandoned
to your labyrinth of darkness, do you imagine now?

A man I married told me one morning,
I don’t think I love you. We’d been married twelve years
though it took him another two years
to walk out the door. To be honest, I never loved him,
not even as I said yes. Yet I know, I’d still be with him
if he hadn’t left.

Borges knew from a young age he would, like his father
and his father’s father before him, become sightless. It’s why
he read every book, he said, before he was fifty.
Why he refused to learn Braille and how
he could tell just by listening how many books
a bookstore held. It’s how, even blind, he could draw
his own face––a scrawl without a mouth or eyes, a ball
of black string tossed on a white sheet of paper. The truth
is not always what’s written down––
I loved that man and, if only a little, I love him still.

Sarah Wetzel | from The Davids Inside David, 2019