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,

(a blush of) presence.
Blind, though? To color?
It was given—still I have no name for it—

a kaleidoscopic panorama of colors
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 whatever we are,

wherever we are, whenever we are,
there’s an open sense—glaze
without the clay; pottery

without the glaze—to glimpse
what that could possibly mean,

and this kisses the boundary
of all I know how to say.
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.

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