Blind Boone's Vision

When I got old enough I asked my mother, to her surprise, to tell me what she did with my eyes. She balked and stalled, sounding unsure for the first time I could remember. It was the tender way she held my face and kissed where tears should have rolled that told me I’d asked of her the almost impossible— to recount my blinding tale, to tell what became of the rest of me. She took me by the hand and led me to a small sapling that stood not much taller than me. I could smell the green marrow of its promise reaching free of the soil like a song from Earth’s royal, dirty mouth. Then Mother told me how she, newly freed, had prayed like a slave through the night when the surgeon took my eyes to save my fevered life, then got off her knees come morning to take the severed parts of me for burial—right there beneath that small tree. They fed the roots, climbed through its leaves to soak in sunlight . . . and so, she told me, I can see. When the wind rustles up and cools me down, when the earth shakes with footsteps and when the sound of birdcalls stirs forests like the black and white bustling ’neath my fingertips I am of the light and shade of my tree. Now, ask me how tall that tree of mine has grown to be after all this time— it touches a place between heaven and here. And I shudder when I hear the earth’s wind in my bones through the bones of that boxed-up swarm of wood, bird and bee: I let it loose . . . and beyond me.