If Your Lids are Halfway Down the Sunrise Throbs. Try It Before you Go Blind

If Your Lids are Halfway Down the Sunrise

Absolutely Throbs.  Feel It Before You Go

Blind

“What vain weather-cocks we are!”        

                                                Emily Bronte

                                                Wuthering Heights

Maybe, if I look at it as though my heart were

beating in my irises, if I see without letting

or allowing myself blink, I'll be the in the breach 

of each thump

of blood going, each

thump of blood coming back, and at last

it will do to see, see! I'm really breathing, along the least 

of seams, the insanity of it, 

to be breathing, hum like a hammer-

struck thumb

before, you know the moment,

it goes into your mouth to cool the pool blue-all

tight as a trojan cinching the possibility

of new life.  In this moment it’s the sun just coming

up in front of the river, the lids

of my eyes go idle and lowly in the sense that they have nothing else

to do but stay halfway open without needing to

rush to be the maid who’s just come in late

for the morning, who’s dressing the table

with plates, who’s making eggs, who’s layering

the whites just right in the washer's drum.  Yes before all that, please,

I make myself

relax to the glaze, the wet, wet glaze just as

the salt's about to be slung.

Don’t you know all eyes have an atmosphere they see

through, breathing, taking the air like a consumptive

like the needy needing to lift

those lacy lungs until a choke hold

squeezes to know

anything: base, abusive, harmonious, erotic…

come let it what you want it

to see be seen breathing beating increasing

then slow as a pin-hole decreasing, easing out to such an edge

as unhanding is the next and only possible goodness

you can achieve.