(Re)vision

Purged in the fire
of the cauterizer—proteins
hard as metal shards pulverized
by drill in the longed-for, mourned-for
eye, stray lash glued under the lid
a casualty midprocedure—across the dark
start of morning, I rise, am revived
behind the prescribed face
shield to fresh dressings
and a warning: this is what
you’ve been missing. We look
at the world once,
in childhood. / The rest is
memory, Glück wrote
years before my sight dulled
to a bubble of soap, beached jelly
gritty with sea. Behind the flat planet
of dilation, the artificial lens settles
while, draped in blue, attendants
flit about the room like little hummers,
shooting beak-like needles to feed
the drip, their clear killers sweet as sugar
and cold as snow as the flurries go
quietly surging. Through afternoon,
my left eye meets the right
in sleep, consoles the wound.
They were born together,
spent a life together,
wept and burned and strained,
mapped hours in the changing
shadows of trees together. Rarely
have they disagreed. What time is it?
I ask, hearing an orderly
wheeling some other someone
down the hall. A helper lifts
a straw of carbonated citrus
to my lips. Outside recovery,
though I cannot see it, the sun sinks,
spraying high-rise steel and glass
the color of cut fruit, while into a mesh
net of early stars, I sense the moon
ascend. Is the rest
memory? Like a spider’s
sac of eggs, whose cells
teem in darkness behind their milk-
white case of silk, she pulses
toward whatever new phase waits.