Two Poems

Madeline DeFrees

The Eye

Lodged in a bony orbit in the skull, the eye
is slower than the hand
and more inclined to doubt in spite of
what the old saw claims: Seeing is believing.
This was not the case with skeptic
Thomas, who put his unbelieving hand
into the Master’s wounded side

and only then
declared his faith. I trust the eye: it winnows
wheat from chaff. And in the furnace, separates
true metal from slag. An eye for minimal
upheaval proves a mode of second
sight: the anthill army’s small
earth-moving crew. Wrought-iron handrails

filigreed with spider-cloth, sequined with dew.
Half-open clematis against
a chain-link fence, their creamy lemon
shading into white. Blue-black sky
swept clean with brushwork in the evening
light and winter-bare japonica’s faint
flush of green before the leaves come out.

Because the eyes are windows on the soul, wise
men close the curtain. Hoard rivers of bright
color. When words arrive with hearts
pinned to their sleeve, the brave will plunge
the writing hand into the right-brain
wound to draw out blood and water
the doubter can believe.

The Poetry of Eyes

In a dark time, Roethke writes,
the eye begins to see. But only with the heart.
The history of eyes, like their anomalies,
is written on the retina, in every image stored
and every stunning line of record.
Bogan’s ambition: a passion wholly of the mind,
Thought divorced from eye

and bone. The eye as horseman
passes by Yeats’s limestone epitaph,
casts a cold eye / On life, on death, and knows not why
faith strikes a bargain with the Tyger
burning in Blake’s song, its fearful symmetry
framed by immortal hand or eye.
God, too, burns bright in the Burning Bush

whose downward rush of flame demands a dimming of
the glare with filmy veils of gossamer:
that is, goose summer or even God’s summer—a spell
of fine weather in late fall. The fragile
cloth of Mary’s winding sheet as she goes back
to Heaven, and we celebrate our new-found vision:
the Indian summer of the eye.

Visit Madeline DeFrees as Image Artist of the Month for June '06

Issue #41• Winter '03-'04