Ahead of me the shapes and colors suggest the sails of Tristan's ship or an elephant's ear floating in air, though in reality it is a middle-aged man in a London Fog raincoat that billows behind him in the April wind. He is like the great dead Greeks in Homer's descriptions of the underworld. In the heliographic distortions of sunlight or dusk, everyone I meet is crossing Charon's river.
People shimmer like beehives.
I was born in the Exeter, New Hampshire, hospital three months prematurely, in March 1955. My identical twin brother lived exactly one day. Taken together we weighed five pounds, but with the death of my twin, my own weight dropped. Within a week my weight stabilized, and then I began to grow. Many children born prematurely in the fifties and early sixties suffer from visual impairments.