NAKED EYE - Bruce Bond
The least touchable of all things,
it wears our dwindled world
like a prayer on a pin, shies
away form the slightest dust,
the stray lash, a blur of flies.
Our own hands are never pure enough.
We balance lenses on our fingers
poised near the shuddering surface.
Still it would be everywhere,
there in its pool the black anemone
blooming: you understand:
how it stares hours in the dim
TV light, reluctant to close,
turns red with so much going forward.
Even in our sleep, shadows
startle from the path it blazes.
It’s the eye’s way of waking
before the body, of burning
the world’s remains to see by.
What could be more estranging,
more intricately shattered
than the prism in it, this iris
bristling with tiny filaments?
We love how the broken colors
streak out of the dark, expelled.
Small wonder, our passion for windows,
if only for their charity,
for the way we forget they’re there.
Even stained glass takes us through
its body, the old wounds reddening
with promise. We come to expect them.
Nights when a wall and its window
darken to their merest difference,
our pupils brighten into beads of oil.
This too is how our needs precede us,
like a silent language of nerves,
the straight beam of a singular life
bearing down. If you look close,
you can see your own gaze floating
on its lens. Or thrown under, say,
the way one mirror rushes into another.
it wears our dwindled world
like a prayer on a pin, shies
away form the slightest dust,
the stray lash, a blur of flies.
Our own hands are never pure enough.
We balance lenses on our fingers
poised near the shuddering surface.
Still it would be everywhere,
there in its pool the black anemone
blooming: you understand:
how it stares hours in the dim
TV light, reluctant to close,
turns red with so much going forward.
Even in our sleep, shadows
startle from the path it blazes.
It’s the eye’s way of waking
before the body, of burning
the world’s remains to see by.
What could be more estranging,
more intricately shattered
than the prism in it, this iris
bristling with tiny filaments?
We love how the broken colors
streak out of the dark, expelled.
Small wonder, our passion for windows,
if only for their charity,
for the way we forget they’re there.
Even stained glass takes us through
its body, the old wounds reddening
with promise. We come to expect them.
Nights when a wall and its window
darken to their merest difference,
our pupils brighten into beads of oil.
This too is how our needs precede us,
like a silent language of nerves,
the straight beam of a singular life
bearing down. If you look close,
you can see your own gaze floating
on its lens. Or thrown under, say,
the way one mirror rushes into another.