Proclamations of Interdependence

— for Priscilla

my friend calls them and somehow

I see the blind man running yesterday

morning when I was walking with Ibai

and stopped for the white GMC van,

the driver, an old man with a slow gaze

up at me, a slower lifted hand which

I read as stop, and I too had lifted mine

but did he think I was waving, did he

see my hand was injured and think, oh,

he’s injured and didn’t think pause, there

is a blind man running in the street path

I’m backing my van into as I wave at this

man and look at him, he might have

thought you look just like your dog but

didn’t say it like the man idling at a traffic

light in downtown Amarillo rolled down

his window to shout hey, hey, you look

just like your dog and I guess I see that,

too, not the resemblance, not the imagined

associations or mistranslated hand gestures,

but the running blind man was not alone

or independent, and whatever we do, even

what we think, we haven’t arrived there

on our own, but are interlaced with some thing

or one unseen, no matter how blind we are to it.

Curtis Bauer is a poet and translator whose writing has been published in numerous magazines and literary journals, including The Common, The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and Tin House. His most recent poetry collection is American Selfie (Barrow Street Press, 2019) and his translation publications of contemporary Spanish-language literature include María Sánchez’s Land of Women (Trinity University Press, 2022), Clara Muschietti’s This Could Take Some Time (Eulalia Books, 2022), Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Your Steps on the Stairs and Fabio Morábito’s The Shadow of the Mammoth (Other Press, 2025). He lives in Spain and Texas and teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University.