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66 After AA, the Somnambulist Dream Again There are eyes like hard boiled eggs hanging from their branch tips, eyes like chairs around a kitchen table when the table’s gone. In The Eye Museum, life-sized models, Cro-Magnon eyes in glass, and the eye-feeling beaming out from a swatch of rubber grass, the plastic rocks displayed. Eyes in knots of wood, in floated bubbles, triangles, eyes inside their corners like the catfish head, the eyeball on the pyramid inside a dollar bill. The eyeball of the wooden knob at the stair rail’s end, the eyeball in the open palm, the period. Here’s the city limits. There’s beyond, with its trees and mice, there’s the life I left behind, where I’d be slumped across a drink, a beer-slicked floor, bleared and private, mad. It seems that I’d been happy, once, just a while ago. That life, then. But take the picture from its frame—a bowl of mute apples, a mess of zinnias, flipping up, like cheerleaders, exploding with their sexual importance for a team, made of light, that crashes at the trim of darkness—and hang the empty frame on its nail in the wall: what is not a picture? How might I comprehend, in something like this stillness and its keen reductions, my self, locked up, on guard in the slowly melting head of the comet of my life? How contend with, once foreseen, this square, pacific darkness recommending —in the blur and mild bewilderment before I can assign to that blue panel on the wall only glass and moonlight; to that tiny eye, electric and now red, just the clock alarm—my last breath, that gradual outburst beginning with the eyes and dropping to the finally-and-forever-open lips, as that breath leaves, walking out on me, smaller, getting smaller as it goes? No one’s talking now, in a company of strangers I have known many years, with saucers and the thin delight of coffee: spoons to ping against the plain ceramic cups and ring, the small weight of the spoon that carries to your wrist, dipping with a spoon, down into the cup, the little, submarine a-blossoming of half-and-half, the steam, signaling: we’re still alive. we’re over here. alive. And then to stir. It’s merely blunt darkness, in a bedroom I don’t recognize for an instant, rising out of sleep, and the premonition of a night when I’ll have started toward a last negotiation, footsteps I have heard in the subway tunnel, diminishing, unseen. ...

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