Noticing the Noticer

Not understanding, and wanting to. The edge of an eye, the unseeing white, curves ambivalently around the pupil, its darkness, its direction. But helping anyway, rounding things out, making a backside to the flat stare, tying the brain, like a stone in its apse, to wild vision, to the everything-of-what's-up-front, the insistence of things before us.

All day long I have moved words toward their funeral, toward fire, illumination. I am helping to build something. I don't know what it is. Like when my father put my hand under his hand to hold the wood while he nailed it in place, something large is helping me to help it. A tobaccoy, fiery breath is in my ear.

The place I am making behind my own pupil is full of beetles' wings and angels.