Deirdre has Erlin syndrome. The cone of her eye is skewed, slanted. Afflicted.
She can’t read more than one word at a time because the ones she’s not focused on spin at
random through the page, and the one she is focusing on is often blurry. Without her filtered sunglasses she might as well be blind.
Her eyes couldn’t make any sense of the world.
She wouldn’t trade her eyesight for anything, though; I can see it in the way she speaks.

Deirdre tells me about what she sees. She says she can see the movement of light as it
travels to and from an object. Her world is one of perpetual motion.
She says she can see more than most people, that she can see
more of the truth. The light we all see, and what the light hits. I wonder some times if
there’s more than that, I wonder if Deirdre really can see it.

No. That’s bullshit. I don’t wonder. I’ve stopped reading into things.
They will read deeply of themselves into you if you
don’t gag them with your own words.

William Carlos Williams:

-so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens-.

So much depends on Deirdre’s eyes. Afflicted or not still they shine. Let her speak and
not be spoken for. Let more and less cease to be questions.

Three days ago, nestled on the warm concrete looking up through the
bright at Deirdre’s pretty white house on Maple street, New Orleans Louisiana.
Dreaming what the world will be like when I open my eyes again, shut tight more for
comfort than to protect from the heat and glare of the sun. And I remember thinking to
myself, what if life were like a notebook entry, a poem scrawled on a cocktail napkin one
dark drunk and forgotten night, a scrap of time and space floating disjointed, no frame of
reference, completely independent? What if I could open my eyes and the background
would be filled in later and I would be only what and where I was and the world
looms even more surreal than the images that throb inside when I lay awake in bed some
nights? The moment would just be the moment, no past with which to justify or explain
it, conclusions based merely on conjecture, not really worth trying to make at all.
Leaving this time this porch this waning sun to be just what it is: a single moment of a
single day, floating in space, unattached and unaware. I guess it would be simpler.

I wish my life were more like words.

talk about Deirdre
(click here)

-Dan Mcnamara bio here