considering the clank of metal closing on metal,

but I still can’t help thinking of how much the frame

is like my frame. The mystery of my Chrysler’s right side

not responding—silent speaker, head lamp dead, window

sealed shut, frozen power door lock—is no more

mystifying than my left ear’s limited frequency range

or the left eye I’m now told is blind by a doctor

who huddles over me to assess some unknown damage.

Damage that is ongoing. A diminishment I’ll live with.

I don’t get cars, but I get this: how difficult it is to get

a wreck off cinder blocks and why my dad once fiddled

daily with a dead Camaro, refusing to believe its silence.

Masticated Light

Masticated Light

In a waiting room at the Kresge Eye Center

my fingers trace the outline of folded money

and I know the two hundred fifty dollars there

is made up of two hundred forty-five I can’t afford to spend

but will spend on a calm voice that can explain

how I can be repaired. Instead, the words legally blind

and nothing can be done mean I’ll spend

the rest of the week closing an eye to the world,

watching how easily this becomes that.

The lampposts lining the walk home

are the thinnest spears I’ve ever seen, a row of trash cans

becomes discarded war drums, and teeth

in the mouth of an oncoming truck

want to tear through me. Some of me

always wants to be swallowed.

The last thing my doctor said before I lost

my insurance was to see a vision specialist

about the way light struggles and bends

through my deformed cornea.

Before the exam I never closed my right eye

and watched the world become a melting watercolor

with the left. Before a doctor shot light

into the twitching thing, before I realized

how little light I could handle, I never

thought much of the boy who clawed up at me

from beneath my punches, how a fingernail scraped

the eye, or how it closed shut

like a door to a room I could never leave.

I could see the reflective mesh of his shoes,

the liquor bottle tossed in an arc

even before it shattered at my feet, and I am embarrassed

at how sharp my eyes were, how deft my body,

my limbs closing the distance—how easily

I owned his face, its fear and fought back tears—

all of it mine. I don’t want to remember the eyes

that glanced over shoulder just before

I dragged him like a gazelle into the grass

that was a stretch of gravel and glass

outside a liquor store. How easily this becomes that.

On a suspension bridge I close my bad eye

and it’s like aiming through a gunsight;

even the good eye is only as good as whatever glass

an optometrist can shape. I watch sundown