THE JUGGLER’S EYES
I didn’t listen to Rabbit,
who taught me how to juggle.
Stay away from the trees, she said,
the branches will pluck
what you’re juggling
right out of the air.
I didn’t listen.
I just went right on juggling.
And for reasons
I didn’t quite understand
I became bewildered
and befuddled by my
little circus act. And then,
sure enough, like Rabbit
had predicted, a tree took
what I had been tossing
up and down, from
hand to hand,
and left me empty-handed
with nothing to juggle.
I sat down beneath those branches
like the Buddha at the base
of the bodhi tree,
and waited—waited
for the season to change,
for the tree to lose its leaves,
for the tree to give me back
what was mine. And sure enough,
when autumn came,
the leaves fell from their limbs
and with them dropped
what I had tossed
too high. I picked the little orbs up
off the ground and put them
where they belonged, back
in their sockets.
It was then that
I finally saw how
blind I had been
to my own blindness,
and just had to laugh.
I howled like Coyote,
and was grateful,
so grateful, for a taste
of my own medicine
and the genius in its trickery.
