On Focus

This morning I couldn’t find my glasses, so I looked on things with my own eyes. My ears told me everything was as it always was: a community of birds, the fourth dimension, talking with, to, and across each other, loudening at the approach of the sun: “it comes! it comes! it comes!” A messianic morning ritual of relief and joy, bringing warmth, even if winter-slender.

Everything was as it always was, except I couldn’t see it rightly. Without my glasses to focus my vision on that fence post, that bush, that downspout, I saw myself seeing. My vision was restless; what I called exterior world was overlain with opaque floaters and shimmering swimmers – dots and squiggles coursing across my field of vision, forcing me to see myself seeing, see my seeing, see my seeing as my seeing.

My vision was active, restless, imposing its own active restlessness on everything it touched, setting the world to quaver unpredictably, now in the bottom left, now center, tracking the leaps of my astigmatism.

How did the birds see it – the rising of the sun that animated them? What did it look like to them? Or was it a feeling, an incremental warming? Or a sound, as I heard them, a loudening become a riot? Did the sun have its own thrum for them, as I heard the pulse of the railroad and sough of the trucks on the freeway?

These my colors arranged by these my rods and cones, my palette, making up this pointillated, fuzz-edged, floater-blurred yard and alley, are mine. What of your yard and your alley – robin, crow, grackle? Does your I make them so restless also?

When the kids wake, so I can retrieve my glasses from their room downstairs, how long will it take before I am once again convinced of my own objectivity?