Readings for a year's end: "the glory of chance"

"Drink"
(Stephen Kuusisto)

The glory of chance
and the hazard of death
met one another
on a windy street --

two rain shadows,
brothers
with the papery, blue faces
of old money --

their cloaks
like palpitant wings,
angels of riot
under winter poplars.

They saw, each to each,
the dark-tongued
and unthreaded
pigments of philos --

knowing how indecorous it was,
love, shining like that
in the other's face --
while somewhere in the trees

the crows went fighting
over a starling's eye.
Two kinsmen in rain --
rain to snow.

Stephen Kuusisto,  blind since birth, is the author of Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and the memoir Planet of the Blind, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He has also published Only Bread, Only Light, a collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press. His new collection of prose poems for Copper Canyon Press entitled Mornings With Borges will be published in February.