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Eye |
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Its secret is simple, deadly simple, the bead a gun draws. It goes on loving what happens to leave it. This is why it hurries to take from the fields of light, until it becomes |
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like a poacher, fattened on that which, in a better state of affairs--reasonable distributions of labor, sorrow and such--it certainly would find baneful. Take my earliest hour: late in the day, |
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the light went sickly pink. The midwife and her crooked women in their shapeless gowns bustled about my mother, urging me out. Dead of winter lay |
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on the land like the trunk of an animal. Chill and cold saw to the birth, not a fastidious event. The road by our house lay full of ice and ruts; idling off into an expanse |
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of bald sod, the sun poured its last in the tilth. So much for amenities: we had intricate life. Behind walls, under counter tops, wherever brooms seldom got, ants garnered crumbs people dropped, |
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and their routes, remote from ours, reflected patterns as alien as the stars. And the stars soon came out. They shone as white as my mother's features drained of life. I am mindful that I could |
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build an order which, like conjurors' pentagrams, charmed a less bleak birth. I think the wide scope's best: I had a crow whose eye crammed the viewable into one sharp look. I taught him to speak, |
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a harsh voice. He had what I lack: the ability to zoom in, gather everything, and with a croak retreat. There we were, beside the rutted road, I eight; the width of Kansas, I somehow |
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wanted it. Thinking to circumvent the eye, I mouthed the metal snow fence, a jolt Galvani would have envied. Sour humility had its tang, but even now I go back. |
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I sat, stuck to the fence, late light the color of a rabbit's iris, but still I go back. What did I really see that winter day, that leaves and stays? A distance that defied gathering, |
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that always went out: snakes in burrows, Indians below the stubble of corn, headstones of pioneers, the crow's wing brushing my face --then I tore loose. I now think |
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| that what we would cleave to, or have cleft from us, brings a smart we bear. Blood may ooze or stop, but the ache stays clear as Orion, wherever we peel an eye before dusk. |
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