To hear Ellen Bryant Voigt reading “Magic Glass,” click here.
The enormous world shimmering—
then, in the magic glass, some of it,
guessed at, came clear.
Whereas my friend “in nature”
takes his glasses off so he
“can think.” When he says
he thinks with his body—body
grown substantial over the years,
as has his thought—
I don’t know what he means; or,
if I do. I think thinking is not
the body’s job,
that the body gets in the way.
Our friendship feeds on argument.
Each of us
has one prominent eye:
his the one on the right, for the left
side of the brain,
language and logic; but mine—
wide and unforgiving—mine
is the one on the left,
enlarged by superstition
and music, like my father’s more
myopic eye.
Detachment is my friend’s
discovery, what he commends
against despair.
And though my father claimed
I never listen, of course I do:
after all, who else
but the blind will lead the blind?
And the years bring their own correction:
to see a thing
one has to push it away.
