Sidelong Glances from the Window

I. (He and I)

At night, the dog's long body groan and then you
beside me, long bodied. Here, on the lithe plane
of the bed, all has become periphery: we line up,
a crescendo enclosed by measure, meter locked
in stanza. Nothing but bare shoulders, epicene,
he is an angel beside me, hovering a bit above
the bed, his message halted at the mouth. The lateral
assumes itself before me; it is a tear in perception,
a window we choose to ignore. In blindness I find myself
at the edges of vision, the distant unbearably intimate.
My limbs become venation; you become half
extremity yourself -- the whole arm of you now,
turning in half-sleep to look at me. Lineation of hand
to bridle, finger to tongue, I rein you in (wylde for to hold,
though I seme tame). We have all recognized the lost love
and turned to find a stranger.

II. (The Acutely Blind)

To my horse the seen was all wary
perpendicular, and for me the world
was the straight window between his ears.
Shifting like the blurred edges of sight,
he came before me in a dream, an incipient Jesus --
I placed my fingers in the sinister blood of his left flank.
To train the horse you must soothe the wound
of domestication (remove the primitive periphery),
though he remained a moment of something wild,
Petrarch's fleeting hynde. Escape arrives
in the unfocused, the farouche, and I, seeing the world
as from around a corner, hunted for disappearance
through a colander, a collar, and a sieve; trying to sift,
to recapture the lost acumen of the eye.
 

III. (The Virgin in the Merode Altarpiece)

On the table, a volume of Picasso portraits, set aside
because the women have been disassembled by the artist.
A painter's subject herself, she cannot bear to see all angles
at once, but in lifting her eyes, finds she cannot avoid the lateral.
She is fading into her book, into the solid words,
and sees -- rather than fiction -- the periphery.
The arriving guests appear on page eighty-six
and on the verso, a mousetrap. Her vision becomes
a fade into herself, not like the neat vases or the open
window, but inside her, here, silhouettes disappear
into glimpses, branch becomes limb (this is for those
who have awakened to a flotilla of finches
collecting on their left shoulder and then alighting,
a touch forgotten before realized -- a tree nearly created).
The angel, with its unnoticed message, appears
on the frontispiece, rendering the room apocryphe.
The house has become nothing but window, 
and she presents herself unaware in the pane.
Distracted from the page, not by the annunciation,
but by the spaniel she thinks she views curled up by the fire,
she turns her face away and, gaining clarity, sees that it has vanished.

First place, Adele Steiner Burleson Award, The University of Texas, 2001