Simone Weil 49

This stick separates me from things, but with it I transpose vision into touch, touch into topography. To stick means to stay, to be affixed to. So I'm separate from what sticks to me, this mask that opens my face like morning blinds. Or if not my face, that tender space between rib and muscle that seismographs feeling. If I touch you with my stick, I can't say whom you resemble. When I say my daughter has a sister, your first question is: “do they look alike?” Brother falls away, as do I. My nose bleeds, not my lines. “He was not blood” means you don't see eye to eye. It means I don't know their history, though my neighbor (whom I hardly know) asks me with such urgency. (Just curious.) What sticks to the real is more obscure: cat scratching for a ping pong ball in the dark.