Florida-based poet Carlton Johnson has been diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy. He published a book titled “A Thimble of Time” in 2020 (available on Amazon). Here’s a poem about focus, despair, and stumbling over words:
On a Thimble
This afternoon, as I balance on a thimble
of time, there is this breath that keeps me nimble
it keeps me through forces centrifugal,
pulling me to words unheard like mugil—
a genus of mullet that swim in the sea,
it helps guide my intentionality
not too difficult when I focus
my mind, a magician’s hocus pocus
and then there are times, just a few,
when shadowed despair clouds what’s true
gifts and dreams from whatever this life
is— like an ivory-handled boning knife,
or the lustrous scent of coffee now filling my nose
with black oak, walnut and cherry, and so it goes.
There is faltering, stumbling over words
in my even best days, they now go unheard.
Once, I cleaved a slab of feldspar with some peening,
it broke into a block, a dog star guided with meaning.