EYES
Eyes are of course a traditional motif in poetry. "tell me where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head? It is engendered in the eyes, with gazing fed." Something happened to me one day which made me really appreciate eyes. I was working on a wet day repairing a post, wire and batten fence. There was a brand new coil of high tensile wire which I cut with wire cutters. The sharp end sprang back and pierced my right eye and pierced my eyeball right through to the retina. I had three eye operations and thanks to the incredible skill of the surgeons, I now still have some peripheral vision in that eye, but to look at anything directly is like looking through a steamed up shower curtain. Oddly I cannot see the colour yellow with my right eye. Yellow looks white and pea green looks turquoise. I am reminded of the artist Monet who did successive paintings of waterlilies as his glaucoma progressed. He had to keep changing his palette because his paintings began to look too yellow.
Diary of an Accident
I cut the high tensile fencing wire
With the forged steel cutters – snip!
The sharp bright cut vicious end
Whips back and skewers my right eyeball.
The wire strikes like a cobra in and out
And then recoils and lies on the grass
Waiting for its dreadful venom to take effect.
Still in control and high on adrenalin
I drive to the neighbours hand on the horn,
Blaring, despairing, crying for help.
Waiting for the ambulance I lie on the clean carpet
In my muddy working clothes
With an ice-pack clutched to my socket.
I squeeze my eye tight shut. I am afraid to look.
And the little daughter clutches her dolly
And stares at the strange man on her mother’s floor.
In the ambulance. Just lie on this bed.
And I worry about my dirty boots.
What’s your first name?
Perhaps it’s only a bruise.
Where do you live?
Perhaps it’s only a bruise.
Are you allergic to any medication?
Perhaps it’s only a bruise.
She bandages both my eyes to stop a blink reflex
And I am driven in pitch blackness
Lost on familiar roads. No time. No distance.
A trial run, a pretend blindness, a practice death.
Hello, my name is Robyn.
How many fingers am I holding up.
Robyn, I can not see you or your hand.
You’ll just feel a little prick as she puts a cannula in
And I feel the venom creep towards my heart.
Eye go, ergo ego follows
As I surrender myself to nurses’ hands.
Only my eye is hurt
But when I take the first few steps
From stretcher to examination stool
And place my head in the iron mask,
I walk like a cringing limping cripple
And with a thin tremulous voice I talk
And tell the inquisitor everything
When she shines the bright light in my left eye
And the dull, dull, dull, dim light in my right eye.
I am patient and I wait.
Sobs, those sons of a bitch, break out
So I am tied to a drip,
Put on a leash of pethadone and I wait.
An x-ray, E.C.G. and a cat scan are required
So I am shaved and taped with little metal studs
That I might interface with Leviathan.
Please lie very, very still.
This will take about ten minutes
As I slide into the valley of the shadow
And in total sensory deprivation
The venom corrodes my spirit
And I am afraid, but I am patient and I wait.
Six hours after the cobra strike
I am wheeled into theatre.
My identity has been compressed to a plastic tag
On my left wrist lest I forget myself
Yet when they slide me from the gurney
To the cold stainless steel slab,
They still thrust a consent form at me
So that my abdication is official.
Just count slowly to ten and you won’t
Remember waking up in the recovery ward
Seeing nothing with my right eye
And with my left occluded with tears.
In an idiotic way
Blindness is staring me in the face.
Startrek
Captains’s Log : 8.am. Sunday 25 November 2001
I am wheeled to theatre on my bed
Like a tour of the Starship Enterprise.
My mission to boldly go
To that uncharted space
Where all my courage fails me.
Airlock doors go whoosh,
Warning lights flash red.
Sterile clothes only past this point.
And so onto the shining bridge.
Bones and Spock are there.
I’d recognize those Vulcan ears
Even over the surgical mask.
Mr Sulu and Lieutenant Ohoura
In her well-filled uniform.
So many people for one small operation
And I expected only Captain Kirk.
In the middle of the bridge
Are the amazing lights of the transporter.
Beam me up, Scotty. For Christ’s sake,
Beam me out of here! But no,
I am due for an eye-operation
Under local anaesthetic.
Things are looking up.
An opaque sheet is placed over my head.
A small window is cut out for the offending eye.
The scissors accidentally nick my nose.
Not an auspicious sign.
The sheet is not so I should not see
The surgeon and his dreadful tools,
Nor be blinded by the transporter beam,
But so that James should not see
The conscious human-being
To whom this isolated eye belongs.
As a wild animal is quiet in a sack,
So too am I struck dumb, I cannot speak.
Lieutenant Ohoura holds my hand
And gently strokes my arm to calm
And reassure me with a human touch.
But I know she has arms of steel
To restrain me, should I panic
And try to tear the horrors from my eye.
My lids are painted with iodine,
My eyeball painted with novacaine.
My eyelids are spread apart with tongs.
Even this hurts, but Kirk chides me and derides me.
Lie still! Look down, look down! LOOK DOWN!
I look but cannot see my toes curled up.
Lie still, lie still! Be good. It doesn’t hurt.
And my abdomen is clenched up tight
Beneath my diaphragm.
As Kirk proceeds, he banters with the crew.
More baling-twine Mr Sulu.
I want a larger darning needle Spock.
Don’t tell me we’re out of numb-weed juice.
Except the terminology is more clinical,
Such as aspiration of muco-pus,
Or in my case muco-pussy galore.
Perhaps I should have used James Bond.
Kirk removes my aqueous humour
And nothing is funny anymore.
He takes a biopsy of the vitreous
And talks of a something or other ectomy,
As if I can’t guess what it means,
That they’re taking my starship out of orbit.
Beam me up Scotty!
For Christ’s sake, beam me up!
And they drip more novacaine on my eyeball,
And Kirk accidentally touches the iris
Which is not numb, not numb at all,
And I go ballistic, warp drive nine.
I’m sorry, that wasn’t meant to happen,
But be good now. Lie still. Be good!
Unclench your jaw muscles!
And I realize that my face
Is drawn up in a rictus of fear.
A harmless drop of saline etches my cheek
Like acid or molten lead.
I whimper and flinch in pain.
Now, don’t be silly! That was only water.
That didn’t hurt a bit. But the fear of pain
Is just as real as pain itself.
I try to put myself into stasis,
A self-imposed hypnotic trance.
And time passes in the worm hole.
One more suture. Just a few seconds to go.
Almost done. Now don’t be silly!
I’m just removing this miniature mantrap
That has been spreading your lids apart.
That can’t possibly hurt. He wouldn’t cope well
With having a baby, would he, Ohoura?
And he tears the adhesive sheet from my face.
The theatre lights assault my other eye
And I am back in normal space.
And suddenly my tongue is freed.
Fuck you, Jimmy! Fuck you, Jimmy!
It does hurt! It does.
Eyes
I have seen the magazine cover
Of the Afghan girl with grass green eyes.
Tigris green, Euphrates green.
Jade amulets flecked with mica gold.
Monet’s waterlilies on the painted pond.
Fair Ophelia floating in her wedding dress
With a coronet of water crowfoot flowers.
Such beauty should not be hidden.
Such eyes should not be veiled.
The Bedouin girl with eyes of brown.
Sloe-eyed daughter of Sheba and Solomon
Considering the blowing lilies,
Pasque flowers and fleurs de lys,
Cinquefoils and roses of Sharon.
Such desert eyes should not blush unseen.
Such flowers would shrivel in yashmak shade.
I have seen the Afghan girl’s grey eyes.
Meltwater of mountain glacier ice,
Dove down, skeins of wild geese
Across a birch bark winter sky.
Such eyes should not be blighted by a shroud.
Such beauty should not be bourka bound.
Beauty like a falcon should fly unfettered.
Shake off the jesses, cast off the hood.
O peregrine from purdah fly
Into the iris of the blue beholder sky,
Into the eye of the sun.
Kingfisher Eyes
He was fourteen when blinded by the bomb
In one last blast of standard yellow red.
They had no right to exploit his plight,
And give him borrowed kingfisher eyes.
When he awoke from induced coma
And they unwrapped his sterile bandages,
The darkness had evaporated,
But his world had changed way out of sight.
The nurse’s skin was translucent marble
Laced with a fernwork frosting of red fire
Where the delta of her arteries
Strobe pulsed far into the infrared.
The bedside flowers were caerulean,
Carnelian, coruscating flares
With the promise-of-nectar hieroglyphs
And runway landing lights for bees.
Taken to the park to acclimatize,
Holding tight to the nurse’s mottled hand.
Her aura shimmered in spikes of concern
As he cringed at the stares of strangers.
The grass was a sickly yellow green
That moaned of the pain of mower blades.
Pollarded plane trees were unbearable
In their grief at the loss of their limbs.
But the birds! Kaleidoscopic jewels,
Those meteoric sparks of vibrant life
With nameless colours, angelic hues,
Following polarized pathways in the sky.
Perhaps at his birth when he first saw birds,
They too had been scintillating, shot-silk,
Opalescent stained cathedral windows
Against the sunrise of a summer day.
He did not want to see the passerby
With the purple cancer stain on her face,
Or the evil lust-green of possession
In the eyes of the park bench lovers.
He did not wish to see the yellowing
Of his mother’s persona in age,
The blue-green shadows of the abused,
Red anger in the ruddy necks of rage.
Kingfishers see the gamut of emotion,
The spectrum of various violent shades
Fading at last to grey indifference.
Kingfishers would be happier blind.
Mars and Venus
Retinal photographs reveal
A side of us we never see.
My left eye is a fiery red,
Mons Olympus and the canals of Mars,
A lava lake of red hot logic
Cooling into rigid basalt hexagons.
My right eye is a sea of clouds,
Violent vortex of emotion,
Churning Charybdis
Of swirling empathy.
Thunderheads of creativity
Unleash the inner lightning
And ideas rain onto the hot surface
Of the Venusian plain.
Next