The Movement of Fields

I’d like to run my eyes along you

and collect you as a pool fills

with the image of a drowned bird,

as a field we’ve seen at different times

reports the face of wind.

 

A boy on a playground stares at me

as if to see where he’s headed—

 

when he’s older, he’ll read these words

and find me looking back.

 

~

 

So sensitive to geometry, we seldom see

beyond what things resemble. It’s useful

to be suspended here behind these words

running like water over everything.

 

We can never really see friends’ faces, though

or the world’s raw hunks and filaments

since even as infants we begin making sense of the world:

learning names for shapes

we’ll only see approximations of.

 

Standing on the dock, I watch

bay waves lacerated by light.

 

~

 

I ask my eyes what happened

in the book they read

and they say, Footprints in ash.

 

I ask them about your face

and they swim beneath dark waves

towing away something silver.

 

I ask them what movies they remember

and they only reply,

 

~ 

 

It was easy for God to make blind life

and the first seeing thing was only a little harder.

 

But the second seeing thing—

to make something

that could look into something

looking into it.

 

~

 

As downtown blooms in a dying day

as our hands clasp in my car

as we pass below bright green lamps and billboards

you fall asleep, which is familiar to me, though I can’t see

where you go when I watch you.