Howard Altmann

An old man with a new hat is running out of pride. I want to tell the truth but I don’t know how. The wind is our best pen and it blows poetry out of the water. I wait for days and weeks to enter a feeling that’s had years to leave. The ocean keeps throwing questions it has all the answers to. A candle lights a room and dims the stars. When all that consoled consoles no longer loneliness finds a room inside the one it knows. I am shrinking from the light and turning into space. An old man with a new hat wears his smile in the dark.

Old and blind and in love with light, he’d reach for the hands of writers to guide him back to the landscape, once the subject of his photo- graphs. Often he’d see just how hard it was to render it right, and would feel free of such burdens. A last cloud on a lake he’d let carry him into night. Breaking sounds of autumn he’d leave a pond to compose, rustling the stream of images. The panicked flight of the hunted he’d let the dry grasses capture, their golden yield his release. Even in the crimson cusp of an evening he’d wedge himself, curling into a ball without twilight ever sinking him. The man swam with the fog and its very touch of resolve. Further than any writer his shadows lapped up the sand. All this in the ebb and flow of a ninth decade by the tide, an inlet mapped by its egress to the sky. And when moonlight would come to wash his window, a heavy tome floating lost worlds on his lap, often his other hand would read the apertures of old cameras, an author’s intent the subject of his alignments. But when the milky skies would dip the hand of a writer in the milky seas, to the light- house he’d ascend, dreaming of being a writer who was blind, tracing a horizon.