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.