Elizabeth McLagan

Elizabeth McLagan is the author of the poetry collections In The White Room (2013) and My Rothko, forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Poems have appeared in Terrain, The Southern Review, Boulevard, L.A. Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She has won an AWP Intro award, the Frances Locke Memorial Award and the Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award.

Suddenly I Could Not See You

The eye, to this day, gives me a cold shudder.  —Charles Darwin

Dearest gaze, dear clarity,
          there was a leak, a drowned island

of sight, a dark flood. Where are you now?
          Eye, I did not know your bull’s-eye

back screen center, the pit of cone cells,
          and in the brain’s assembly line an image.

Retina cover, eye wash, braided ditch—
          dear drusen, your glittering lumps

made of my macula a swarm of lies.
          Twists, deviations, a smashed screen.

Degenerate one, I must learn to know you.
          Dear cyclops, dear distorted landscape.

Like erosion maps, wind-driven contours,
          slide lines, a wrinkle in the grid.

A shot in the eye, the dust clouds clear,
          the lake dries, its bed remains

a scooped out aberration
          that which wanders away, errors resulting.

Sink basin, salt flat, ridge
          meander, perpetual fault line.

Dear eye map, one clear, the other
          permanent scar, my gaze rows inward:

dear monster, dear you impending disaster,
          dear almost visible invisible nothings.

How We Got To Where We Are Now

The doors through which we view the world were first opened
as experiments in desperation. —James V. Stone

Consider the first eyes
               pitched toward hunger:

A vibe. An ultraviolet dance. Shimmering
                         honeycombs of space.

Wing-dart, leaf flick, sight lines
               to a honeyed center.

Many generations. Costly experiments.
               Blind to stillness.

Then a simple pair. Retina, pin-hole, lens.
               Cornea, pupil, liquid humors.

                         A blind spot.
               backward pointing cones and rods,

the light passing through layers
               of nerves and braided streams of blood,

arriving in waves
               unevenly focused.

                         Then, brain work.
Composition. To focus the red-green fields

of hunger, blue haze of thirst. And then the more
               we keep trying to name.

Moving shadows, leaf patterns,
               your eyes locked on mine.

So what, imperfect sight. The eyes wobble,
               pixels engorge, enflame.

The shiver, the fizz, the more
               we keep trying to name.