Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths: Poems

Vision

Vision She picks up her husband’s glasses, puts them on the bridge of her nose, looks in the bedroom mirror. The thick lenses see two wives —blurred, bleeding their outlines, divorced from the mirror’s face. Behind her, the white satin quilt hugs the bed like heavy fog, and the side table with its vase of blue hyacinths is breathlessly in focus, but the wives in the mirror merge and split, mouth words with their eyelashes, dance rumba with their elbows, sexy burlesque with their knees, stretch then shrink. They make the eyes dizzy like a bad carnival ride. She takes off the glasses, wipes her lids, and wonders if the butterfly who grew vulture wings was just a man mad with rippled eyes. 11 ...