If the doctor’s new machine is right, my eyes
are turning into old window glass, warped,
distorted at a thousand points, watching
the moon’s fine edge start to fray. But it’s spring,
and as if our rooms perched in its branches,
a flowering tree fills the windows. How easy
to say as if—as if we were that couple of tiny
northern parulas, flitting from limb to limb,
as if we had flown all night, then dropped down
through power lines to feed at first light,
exhausted and starving, intent on the journey,
impelled to breed, breed, make life, always more life.
My grandmother of the coke bottle lenses,
of the enormous blue eyes flying close
to the glass like a creature about to crash,
used to recite when she stumbled, “’I see,’
said the blind man when he bumped into the light,”
which I only recalled after slamming into
the plate glass I must have thought was a door—
or didn’t think at all, lost inside my head,
as I charged full speed into spectacle-snap,
black-eye smack, at which I saw suddenly
how much I didn’t see at all, with a whole
restaurant watching. When a bird flies into glass
does it pass from stun to sob, and have to
make up a new song, or does it shake off
the shock and go on where it was headed
all along, forget reflection? “I once was blind,
but now I see,” John Newton wrote, and then
gave up his slave ship to grieve all the ruin
he had wrought. But how did he come to see—
what fell from his eyes, what lens was corrected?
Until I really looked, I thought geese flew
in those perfect V’s we were taught in school,
which would mean this flock heading north aren’t geese
at all, with their constantly changing stream
of unraveling threads, with their one straggler
wildly flapping to catch up, that outsider
squawking a different tune. Now a small breeze
flies into the tree, so its blossoms flutter,
and a few tear loose to rise, to drift briefly
in the otherwise unseeable air,
that invisible substance we call nothing
and couldn’t live two minutes without.
