Cataract Surgery

 

One eye can still see into the past;
yellowed like old photographs of cars and thin girls in jeans 
with long straight hair; like cigarette stained walls, like bourbon.
The old sight is blurry and faded, fog along the ground.
I didn't realize how every color, every sight, was changed 
by these decaying proteins, this flotsam of age.

The new eye sees the white ceiling as, I guess, white. 
Fluorescent. What other people see.
The sky is blue and untainted as with 
smoke from far off forest fires.
The leaves are deeper green, more alive; 
the golds and reds of Autumn to come less obvious.

But my old eye still sees into the past
still sees every failed attempt at love,
every hurtful miscalculation, 
every lost forking away from the path.
I am not sure which vision colors my dreams now
but when I lie awake in the early hours

before the dawn breaks in grey (or butter yellow),
all the old failures, the ghosts, the cold anxieties
are colored by my old eye.

It will soon be corrected.

Squiby

i

It has been as I always suspected
it would be. No less than to
turn over to sleep and fall away deeply.
Fall into blue to indigo to black.

Wait! Can't the moonlight crackle
and burn, sputter like a tallow wick,
Catch and blossom into flame?

ii

The afternoon Sun is oblivious
to the conversation in the other room.
The generations hear each other
in the stories and laughter.

The birds call from the hedge.
The sunlight moves across the wall,
over baskets on the bookshelf,
over old prints of French castles.

It moves of its own accord,
inexorable and unforgiving.
One hundred years of afternoons
have crossed this room from wall to wall.

Outside, the stones scream in agony
and the lawn cannot hide.
The trees boil the light into green.

iii

Breakfast on the last day -
cupcakes, hot dogs (no buns)
boiled eggs, dill relish
ice cream.

iv

Red as cooked lobsters,
we think we know all the roads now and
enter the Chilmark General Store like natives -

Or so we imagine.

August, 2010 \ July 2026