Figured Dark: Poems

Glaucoma

Glaucoma The loss is slow to arrive. A narrowing of the canals that lead from the eyes and the edges erode, the peripheral field dissolves to a haze of green and gray. The mailbox is gone, children in a snowbank, a crow turning its head in a walnut tree. A tunneling of sight that comes with age, layered over near sight, far sight, haloed lights, the go-slow response of the iris. The pressure builds within my eyes, within and then behind; headaches throb in the afternoons. The flagstones heave slightly in the early days of winter, treacherous when no one is watching. Until the loss is finally a loss. I will not walk this way again. ■ ■ The things I’ll never see weigh against what I have: the moon alone above the pines, a swirl of river, water-skin like a snake’s skin, the silence of my daughter in her armchair by the window, radio hissing jazz from forty miles distant, poplars in two feet of snow 47 and the moon again–– behind the clouds, drifting. ■ ■ Atop a ladder, I chop ice at the eaves, fearing winter may destroy my house. The ice is gray and stained by leaves–– umber stains against the yellow siding. From the fourth rung I look in to see twelve oranges in a blue ceramic bowl, fired as the sun breaks through the scudding clouds. The oranges are rough and cool to the touch. a latent sweetness––the sun, the bowl, the nippled fruit. ■ ■ “Tunnel vision” implies loss at the margins, a snow-covered hedge and the plow looming behind it. Or a life with no exits. The way John Donne, walking through Mitcham in a crisis of faith, saw only the pismire ahead–– the muck barely crusting, a way too fetid to freeze. Does he see clearly, or has he lost the world beyond the troubles of his own life, turning and turning? My daughter, back from seeing the ballet, explains the Cowgirl’s love for the Wrangler by drawing the Cowgirl’s eyes popping from her head, eyes distorted to the shape of love: Heart, heart, heart, heart. Who is the artist who can draw such attention? ■ ■ 48 They choir in the wood lot–– a list of birds judged otherwise useless: blackbirds, cowbirds, grackles, iridescent starlings–– swirl like smoke against a darkling sky, then settle for a time, a rasping, cacophonous applause against more powerful weather. Their song defies, it has no melody. They explode from the pines and are gone. ■ ■ Following Wilson’s original design, I tried to build a cloud chamber in an old brass meter, a way to trace the wake of an electron across a vapor field. That was years ago; the first time I failed science. I wanted to map the passage of light from molecule to molecule, to see through the round glass–– sparks, bonded to water and passing on. Now, reduced to four senses, I follow my dog through the trees and stop at the clearing, where, last summer, I planted a row of sage. I pull the leaves to my face and roll them between my fingers, until my hand is a pungent mix of pepper, mint, and hay. ■ ■ At the doctor’s office, I am pronounced “glaucoma suspect,” 49 as in one who committed the crime with malice aforethought, loved ones bludgeoned in a cold rage. I am told it can be held, arrested with drops, artificial tears that permit the aqueous humor to flow unimpeded. To say it clearly, to weep is to see the world. And so this final test: my chin at rest, tiny meteors of light whir through a twilight field around my face. My task–– to tap a bar as the lights appear, creating the data from which my vision will be traced. The lights come at me, faster, slowing. A picture builds within the machine of what has been lost and what can be saved. And this is where I begin the poem, undone, stars blowing by and the wings of birds fluttering at the margins. O, this round earth, O, the world’s imagined corners. 50 ...