If You Have a Lazy Eye

the rise

If You Have a Lazy Eye

have you ever noticed when you focus

on resting the eye in the socket

looking down at nothing

or something the grain in the wood

the desk is made of say

waves in some places feathers

in others, a whole grove of trees I

think may have been laid

flat to create this place where I lean

my elbows every day where I drink enough

to start my day but its not enough

never to sit long enough then be

to be not the sudden shock time’s

betting bald and still

there are towels to wash (on with the bleach

but whose blood and why) and

yesterdays jeans and fleece, the lot got off

to wash at two a.m. before I sit

here before I lean into David

Whyte and Victor Hugo and William

Faulkner and Edgar Lee Masters

and Henry David Thoreau and Donald

Hall and shit where are the women

(oh but don’t you worry, I’m saying

Dickinson I’m saying Dinesen I’m saying

Arundhati Roy I'm saying Anna

Akhmatova) and I want

to remember something they said

                (which they?)

I want to remember now but this

lazy eye blurs now like milk thin ok

but enough to plug the duct to rub

and rub and rub and rest

I say what did they say I saw it

didn’t you see it isn’t it cold

right now I’m distracted by my feet

I brought the space heater up from the base-

ment I’m so much cold and have a knit

hat on and I dreamed I ran out of gas

as we rounded a tight corner and it was

a half a mile back to the gas station

and I said I’d go alone

and I got lost and someone pointed

through a gate at a horizon and I started

to walk there and I woke up wondering but

how was I going to carry

that gas in my hands? and let me just stop

in here and buy a coat I’m going to get cold

going that last half mile through

the trees through the gate the waves

the feathers the pitch 

of the sea increasing

coming to white each crested lip

an old man’s mustache from where I’m sitting

staring and resting this goddam lazy eye.
and who, because the frost on the window
reminds me i wanted to know and remember
drew in the attic at the Old Manse
and why those particular things
a bee a rat a lady they'll stay
until the sun rises and pulls them down
(my images aren't safe, but thankfully theirs are)
into the caulking that's cracked that's failed
but it's all we've got to get us through
to get us into but through what
and into what I want to know and really

who can say?