Christopher Phelps
THE CEILING OF MY EYES
Stretched over years, my earliest memory
was a near-nightly, clarifying blur.
It was a roil of colors
in the well-enveloped dark,
in my (I was told) color-blind eyes.
Its themes were immersion, transition,
and that word I tend to hide from,
(blushing) presence.
Blind, though? To color?
It was given—still I have no name for it—
a kaleidoscopic panorama of hues
dim to the point of brightness,
softening distinctness. Even now
I let this vision alone, unknown
as a first and last resort. A retreat
I forget exists for a decade at a time,
then startle to remember. A vision
given anyone who looks,
I believe, in the dark.
Once I cried, and the light got clearer,
the color even deeper, of the stipple in my eyes
or in the world, if there’s a difference.
For the miraculous to root, I’ve been told
we need the anchor of belief.
I have (very nearly) no beliefs.
Just a continuous image, and a feeling
that wherever we are,
whenever we are, whatever we are,
iridescence is its own sense—
glaze without pottery; seeing
without saying it’s sight. To glimpse
what that could possibly mean,
this kisses the boundary
of all I know how to write.
You quantum fidgets. You restless violets
and greens and reds and oranges
as intense as I can imagine,
at once still-like and turning
into shapes, mosaics,
scenes as such—
and nothing so certain as a terror;
nothing so specific as delight.