The Interchangeable World of the Micronauts
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What half-blind is like:
like two microscopes in my head
each with differently stuck objectives.
They enable the small and the very small
and reduce everything else to blur and shade.
Yet you can train even this.
Train it to spot the shape of sharks’ teeth,
of which there are many samples and many shapes
but not as many as flecks of sand, pieces of shell.
I have hundreds plucked from the shore.
But in the same beach I buried a toy
and never found it again. A tiny toy:
articulate, a translucent man, a smallness
to whom the world was an unbounded wonder.
Blemished and damaged I would hold him up
and say He is broken and anyone who could see
would say He looks fine to me.
But they can see well, not finely.
Look at his face, etched and serrated
by that gargantuan saw.
The cracked shell of his translucent skin,
buried in rubble now, and those teeth,
all that remain of terrible and invisible jaws.
Such a fitting poem with the island poem, the shark and sand. I love the perception of seeing well vs seeing finely. How people are blinded and sharks don't see well or are blind (I don't remember). Looking for something but finding something else.
ReplyDeleteAccording to the wildlife muesium, "A shark's eye includes a cornea, iris, lens and retina just like ours, and has rods and cones, allowing the shark to see in color and at different levels of light."
DeleteI wonder if the poet knows this newer info?