What seems to be the main problem the narrator has with his wife’s blind friend is not his blindness–though that is the focus of the change brought about in the empathy of the narrator–but rather his feelings of being an outsider. He is her second husband. She has shared her past with him and yet he does not want it, would likely prefer not to have known about the men in her life prior to him and would definitely prefer she sever her ties with Robert. This self-centeredness brought about by feelings of exclusion (after all, all three of them knew each other in the time before the narrator came into her life) causes him to overemphasize their flaws–even his own wife’s, i.e., putting down her poetry. As a matter of fact, this comes into play:
She told me he touched his finger to every part of her face, her nose–even her neck! She never forgot it. She even tried to write a poem about it.
Just by the language Carver uses, he tells us what’s going on without coming out and saying it–this is extremely skilled particularly when it’s coming from the first person narrator and we’re learning more about him that he’s admitting to us: "every part of her face, her nose–even her neck!" These are parts of her physical being that he feels only he has a right to touch. "She never forgot it." There, this blind man has captured a portion of her mental space as well. And the clincher: "She even tried to write a poem about it." The coupe de grace–a part of her emotional self.
What he doesn’t mention is if she ever wrote a poem about or to him. This question becomes extremely painful when you realize he says:
She was always trying to write a poem. She wrote a poem or two every year, usually after something really important had happened to her.
He’s disdainful of her poetry; likely because indeed, she had never written one for him.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology