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The book The House of the World has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is now available on Amazon.

Losing My Glasses

I lost my glasses
somewhere under the moon.
Somewhere hidden in tall weeds,
the sarcophagus of the gutter.
Lenses which saw everything.
Through which light perished
in my eyes,
exposed to mystery,
endless words,
television screens.
They accumulated thousands of faces,
the rust of dawn
commingled with the blue radiance
of night.

No name is in the case,
an address,
a way to be found.
They are anonymous,
holding years of sleep,
resting in a chair,
perching like birds on my chest,
fallen to the floor,
tethered by an invisible need.
Fingers that have washed,
wiped, adjusted their surfaces,
until my fingers learned to see
like the eyes of birds, fish,
stones through which
the world moved in a colloquy
of color and darkness.

Without my glasses
I am reduced,
shoved in a corner,
listening where I once saw,
feeling, where at a glance
I understood.
Without them I am nothing
but an uprooted tree,
cast over,
seeing the ground for the first time,
and longing for faces
I took for granted,
knowing what the blind know,
how deep the heart goes
through its eyes.

Published inIndex of all Poems