for Curtis

It’s not that I’ll be 65 next month,
or that I’ve had to wade through
the confusion of Medicare, but
the long-loved optometrist
saying, I’m pulling the trigger—

something we’ve talked about
for years—writing the prescription
for drops that, she promises, will
plump up my puny lashes, deepen
the hazel of my irises, and, we hope,
halt any possibility of early
glaucoma in its tracks.

Like Bodie, I say, the ghost
town, in arrested decay?

She laughs, this other Janis
who has looked longer, more
deeply into my eyes than
anyone who has loved me,
studied my retinas, examined
the macula and the optic nerve,
a tiny glimpse into the human
central nervous system.

The enormity of this hits me
a day later, seizes my chest,
watering my precious eyes before
any drops enter them. And it takes
me a minute to breathe, before
calling the college boyfriend,

legally blind since babyhood,
who understands better than
anyone I know what it is to live
partially sighted, who spent his
career working on behalf of people
with disabilities, who has said more
than once that most of us find
ourselves disabled at some point—
perhaps not permanently, but…

I know that I need to hear the voice
of this man who, though he could barely
see me, long ago looked into my eyes,
those of my younger, still-forming self—
understanding something about my
depths that I did not—

to gently tell me four decades later,

—The drops will help.
—You’ll be OK.
—I love you.