Its Ghostly Workshop: Poems

Flashes

68 Flashes for Dave Smith It’s not the eye I took the grounder in, that roller that hopped just once, exploded inside my skull, spinning me into left where I clawed the grass and everybody came running and none of them laughing. You never saw a worse shiner. By Sunday something made of calf’s liver had eaten the eye and festered into a naked, fist-sized gastropod that wanted the rest of my face. It happened at third, which I played damned well, if I do say so myself. The killer streaked just inside the line, dirt-hugging laser I’d begged for from the fungoed high school star who gave me what I said I wanted—then a visionary blink of supernova. I really thought the eye had burst inside the socket. What else could make such a flash? But these flashes—that’s what the doc calls them— they’re in the left eye. Offstage lightning by candlelight. And, man, do they make floaters. I’m half blind with dustballs, dark matter. If they’re still there in two weeks, come back, he says. Or if they get worse—the flashes— phone us right away. Nothing detached. No tears or wrinkles on the retina yet. This is easy stuff. We do it all the time. He breathes snuff or foot powder down at my immobile head. We do it with a tiny beam of light. No shit, I think but don’t quite say. So, today, I move mysterious in dark glasses through a 69 daylight world frozen in a flash of too much revelation, thinking of you, my friend, whose eyes have held up well since we stood at the door of your room crammed with books, deploring clichés and, I remember—don’t I?— one of us quoting Emerson and speculating on blindness, standing easy in those bodies we both seemed to think were already old, not having a clue about this future we’ve kept somehow scooping up, getting out, and jogging away from—you guessed it—past home. ...