By Susan Glass

Perhaps you are not my subject of address;
but your reputation for flexibility precedes you,
as my fingertips and I well know.
We were there, you see,
when you captured the initially meaningless pebbles-
ticklish filigree lace on cardboard paper.
I still recall our first word: rain.
In contracted braille, it arrived:
Cell one: three dots left and one at mid-level right.
Cell two: one dot at top left.
Cell three: two subtler points, better mannered, less demanding,
nestling midrange, mid finger pad.
On that afternoon of first differentiation,
it was, in fact, raining in the leaf-flecked garden.
Sycamore and oak muted the drops
so that they hissed like skillet garlic.
So too, those dots beneath my right-hand index finger
hissed into recognition.
(ten-fingered mastery came later for me.)
That first neural path, from fingertip to visual cortex,
bypassed my passive eyes and forgave their shyness.
With one word, rain,
the new wiring laid itself
into place.