Hourglasses
This is what it means to commit to reading specs
the cheap kind, heavy as an owl on the edge of your nose
with lenses that pop like tops of medicine bottles,
frames sturdy as drafty doors of a 1973 Holiday Rambler
that sleeps six, rusts in patches and takes the nostalgia right out
of getting old. You’re better for having the memory
of sight, better for landing on hands and knees
in front of the sofa, running your fingers through
crumbs and dust and wishing to find that place where lost
things are found, wishing hard, so hard that headaches
and bloodshot eyes suddenly free themselves from attachments
and neurons triangulate in the shaded lint of evening
and there it is, but not the plastic one point five
magnification fake eye you were looking for.
Instead you find the Ticonderoga three-sided pencil
that your husband has been missing. Because you love him
you place the pencil next to his notebook.
Because you see his eyes, dark as blazed whiskey, framed
in titanium, you turn the light in his direction. Up close,
a thousand words resolve with careful plotting inside
a teaspoon’s worth of sifted sand. There is no harm
in practicing mole-ness. There is no failure
in blinking yourself into clarity.