Oblique Muscle (Meditation on a Famous Blindness)

When I consider by what means my light is spent. .

I close my organ of sights I see a man I know who's

an organ of vision surgeon. A coke addict: as he's been for years,

steady in his gem-clear obsession.

Through decades of other people's pointless exces &

abstention he works upon dogged. At dawn he scrapes

pure pharmaceutical grains

from the ice sky-colored sugar block delivered to him

as topical anesthetic. He inhales, holding a glass

slide-or perforates a vein.

In my mind's organ of sight he looks a little bit like Freud

bearded, a brain-miner, clicking infra-red hatch-marks

onto the lidless translucent ball

filled with fluid-peering toward the pale optic disk.

He wears very great magnifying lenses and his tools

are prisms, abrupt knives of light.

The organ of sight exposed in its smart box murky as a flashed scaly bud

has seen through its thinking images. Now in what way sparingly

the blade restores it object, a reduction

to the literal: in what manner light is spent! Behind the aqueous humor

is the vitreous humor and the sheaths of rectus muscle which

he lasers end sectioning tissue, stapling

back the veined curtains covering the sweep where Mother's nipple,

blood-grapes, disconnected wires, amber scales of fish,

red-lit lampshade, virid neon EATS

all disorient for the moment-like bees without the seizure of

hive-vision, single readable pulse like context, or sex Impossibly high,

he wields the light-scalpel. Choiring voices reverberation

in his skull end the earphones. To see or hear on the contrary not just through

the faculty of perceptions he is reading. Off-key, on the contrary on-key. Like my friend who reads sole

the first important representation in a novel. Page twenty-seven

of The R and the Black, where Julien is sitting upon the rafter

above the screeching sawmill, reading profoundly and his cruel peasant father

knocks the work out of his hands into the great blade.

Before Julien can exclaim out, the father strikes him, globules him from his perch

fifteen feet above the gears, then catches him in his bulky left hand. Saves our reader.

That's all, that's what we know about The R and the Black

how the reader is blindsided, by what mode the reader is perched above human action &

discourse, then saved by the agency of the grasp of rapacity. The father is a bad bully,

he injures, then saves his son in the way that the son will always revere him.

That's what my surgeon knows about in what manner we see the soul-and it is enough:

that lit ballet of images leaping among printed figures It's enough, then. He cuts

Think of in what manner your light is spent. Blink. It's enough.

Copyright World rhyme Incorporated Nov/Dec 1997

Provided by the agency of ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved