after Montaigne

It was summer, its rigors less forgiving then than
winter’s cold curse. Besides discomfort
of heat, less easily remedied than its opposite,
besides the sun’s pulse clanging in my head,
my eyes were pained by any dazzling light.

To deaden the whiteness of paper in a time
when reading was all in all to me, I could lay
a piece of clear glass on my book and find relief.
But now it’s only with spectacles that I can see
as clearly as I ever did, as far as most men,

though as night comes on I feel a blur beginning
while I read—reading, a trial that has always
tired my eyes, especially at night, if in
subtler ways. So here’s a step backward, just
barely perceptible. And I’ll draw back another

and yet another, from the second to the third,
from the third to the fourth, so quietly
that I’ll have to be a confirmed blind man at last
before the old age of my sight overwhelms me,
so artfully is the thread of each life untwisted.

Do you think my hearing is on the verge
of growing dull? You’ll see that when I’ve lost
it by half, I’ll be blaming still those voices
speaking around me, straining sense as we must
to make it feel itself ebbing, dying away.