Lenses
1 / Contacts
Light as parentheses, your scales
(If not quite true so far
For weighing things "exactly as they are,"
OK for skills
And situations) float
Insensibly on unshed tears...
One spark of dust? Quick, the extinguishers!
A stare afire, an entire flight
--Out, out! Their little drum's
Twin lids unscrew to let them soak.
And (look) here comes the Sandman with his sack
Of love and dreams.
2 / Microscopic
The club is tiny, hard to locate. No
Neon sign, no noise.
You need immense focus and poise
To catch its minstrel show:
Nonstop cakewalk of multiple-jointed
Carbon-featured end-
Man enzymes, each with mirror friend
And high on his personal acid. Disappointed?
Still out to bridge the chasm?
But the strict program will not cease to size
You up, enucleate your inmost eye's
Nostalgie du protoplasme.
3 / Telescope
Mark tonight's variation Maggiore. Lento.
Clear. Cold. The heavens' hushed, centrifugal evasion
Of the bungled hospitality we call vision.
Even should one of their company, entering the lean-to
Cloaked in a darkness bygone splendors break through,
Begin--O my swineherd!--the retelling, his itinerary
Is simply too complicated, too remote and solitary
For any human mind to stay awake through.
Yes, it was more than you or I could have imagined
Without the sense that made an old black pointer
Dozing by your embers twitch upright, and know the Hunter
And earn this dusty corner of his legend.
4 / Camera
Eyes wild, hair midnight-tangled, robe in disarray,
Convulsed by sobs, or laughter:
Once again they've photographed her,
That everlasting woman led away
From--flash! As background blurs,
Hands out of nowhere reach for tommorrow's saint.
Which terrible, which heaven-sent
Passion was hers--
Stark grief, stark frenzy, stark
Helpless amusement? All of these?
Not to be outfaced by journalese,
Print her likeness in your own red dark.
- Scales/Contacts: alluding to
- the metaphor of the eyes functioning as a pair of scales, as Benvolio to Romeo in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (act 1 sc. 1):
Tut, you saw her fair, none else being by,
Herself poised with herself in either eye:
But in that crystal scales let there be weigh'd
Your lady's love against some other maid
That I will show you shining at this feast,
And she shall scant show well that now shows best.
- 2) the shape of the contacts themselves, shaped like the curved pans of a balancing scale, and
-
3) the apostle Paul's loss and subsequent restoration of sight, recounted in the book of Acts, chapter 9:
18Immediately, something like scales fell from Saul's eyes, and he could see again.
- "exactly as they are": a quote from Wallace Stevens' The Man with the Blue Guitar.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said to him, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are."
Created by
guccipiggy
Last modified
2005-03-17 09:04 PM
