Braille Lesson
“Stop rubbing,” says your Braille instructor
because you’re rubbing the dots
up and down, up and down,
to feel them better. Because they’re hard to feel
and it feels like you need a pencil sharpener
for your finger. “Just let your finger glide
across the page, left to right, softly but firmly,
and without rubbing.” But the thing is
rubbing feels good so you do it, and you keep on doing it,
which reminds you of other kinds of rubbing you have done.
“It’s hard not to do it,” you tell your teacher
whom you can’t see but can feel nodding sympathetically.
“Yes, but it’s a bad habit. It will be hard to break
down the road. Best break it now.” Still,
rubbing is the only way you can make
sense of the dots. There are six of them,
two columns of three, in every braille cell,
and each position has two possibilities: Dot
or no dot. What you’re doing is essentially
a very soft whack-a-mole with the whorl of your index.
There are sixty-four possible combinations
of the six dots–two to the sixth power. Or two times two
times two times two times two times two.
You’re a safe cracker trying to figure out
the combination. Every time. Every letter. “You’re
rubbing again,” says the teacher. If only
you could break in, grab the money, the treasure. Grasp it.
Flirting with the Deaf
I’ve been watching you watching the
interpreter. She is just to the left of the
speaker, and always slightly behind
so that you are always slightly behind
too, your face registering surprise
when the surprise has already been,
your smile on the heels of the other smiles,
your laugh coming after the wave of
laughter subsides. I love the lag time, the
pause between word and sign, the space
between signifier and signifier and
signifed. I want to slip inside that space and sit
across from you, legs crossed, hands
folded in my lap. If I made myself very
small, inconspicuous, insignificant as
another pair of antennae on the wall,
just watching you, quietly, watching the
interpreter, could I, could we, fit?
Paul Hostovsky makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter and Braille instructor. His poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog.
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