Darwin’s Eyes

He kept seeing himself, a swallow
peeking from its nest, moss, the crawl
of a wasp across his study window.

And he kept having to drop everything and duck
as certain callers appeared in the mirror
he’d aimed at the front door.

A beak he could understand. A talon
was a hand holding his own. It was the eye,
with its vicious complexity, that stabbed at him—

lightning bolts of doubt,
a cyclopean stare, ten years his  Origin
stewing in a stack of notes.

And the eye, perhaps, why he went back,
after all was said and begun,
to the worms, spending his last years

watching them as his fingers
wriggled over piano keys, exploring up
the scales and down, concerto

and dirge. His first passion, his final,
those tender needles with their dark impulse
to feel all around them our earth.