Insight
for Betsy Holdsworth
A box wherefrom
Insides too huge
For a tiny item’s
Last refuge,
Like a planet in space,
As faraway as is,
Lost in its case,
A pair of glasses,
Whose world grows wide
Through heavy lenses,
Puffed and four-eye’d;
Magnifying hence is
A feature of sight,
Where space just suffices
The matrix of light,
And eyepieces need twice as
Much distance to see
Their small paradises,
Focus obsessively
Heedless to sizes,
Whose creatures eye
Their panopticon pen,
Then multiply
The scenery again,
Until their desires
Get out of hand
And kaleidoscope fires
Bezel from land,
From hundreds of facets
Like the eyes of a fly,
So that spectacles’ assets
Surfeit the sky:
Myopic empires
Increase when divided,
Which sometimes requires
Being far-sighted—
Our vision is grown
With postage pending,
Strewn by its own
Boundless sending.
August 27th, 2003
Tippet Alley
October 25th, 2021
Kaiholu
Explanation
A friend of ours had left two pairs of glasses behind after a lovely Easter weekend at our place, and I mailed them back in a box much too large for them. Glasses need more room, I reasoned, as magnifying sight lessens space.
The point was the revenge of the nearsighted on the world: in our blindness lies our vision. I think of wide-eyed children in paradise, or myself when I was young, where everything seemed larger than it was: vast parks became, on revisiting, small yards. The way horses’ eyes magnify their riders.
Sight is a function of experience and we, lost in the large boxes, the camera obscura of our houses, grow into the spaces we are given, by continuing to look.