A lash extracted clumsily …
For nights & days the eye smarts
and weeps. Have I been in a fight
a colleague joshes me.
Yes, I feel like answering, the fight,
always lost, to see clearly.
Images mist beyond the window
while I fear for my sight.
Normal vision is at length restored.
Expansive relief – even
the sense that how I usually
perceive is flawed
wants to turn for its emblem to
the kind of Florentine heat
that conjures from dust in a scorched path
a mirage of dew,
which, as you bend towards it, hardens
but prints an after-image,
lingering like an aesthete’s dream
of fountains in stone gardens
