Sister I will wear Glasses

Some lights are damn hard to picture.

I mean to photograph.
The moon. Silver shining moon.
Silver-blue light on the earth.
Try taking a picture of that!
With your cheap camera.
Or even with your good camera!
I think it still doesn’t work.
I look at the moonlight pictures I can find,
And I can’t find one photo
That looks anything like the moonlight I see.
No blue-silver light on the earth, no man
In the moon.

No camera sees what I see.

Some lights are impossible to photograph.
And damn hard to picture.
There are some things I can see –
Maybe you can see –
That the camera – just – can’t –

Not a metaphor for seeing here,
I’m talking literally here!
I’m talking fact!
I mean I do THIS –

And all my world is blurry…
Everything kinds of melts into itself…
And its edges trail off like an awkward conversation…
Except  – Lights around me,
Bright lights, bold lights,
Sharp lights – those have sharp edges!
Scalloped edges, points outward,
Something swimming within?
Or more like
Something stuck to the edge of a glass,
Sliding wet downwards – I blink and it’s up again.
As if it’s on one side or the other of my lenses.

And as I stare at them,
The lights shrink,
Un-shrink, As if pulsing –
I’m not feeling a single twitch in my head
But then I wouldn’t know would I?

I wouldn’t know when my irises were closing,
Or opening.
My eyes aren’t camera lenses,
I don’t adjust the aperture.
They adjust themselves FOR me,
Like the camera on an old iphone,
You know? You point it at the moon
And the stupid thing adjusts itself
To blur itself into ruining your perfect shot!
Somehow the bright lights at Apple
Designed a camera that works like the human iris,
It responds to light too well,
Shrinks from it –

Except just the iris,
Not the eyeball
Or the retina
Or the brain.
Retina display is a false promise.
No camera yet can match the eye.

The best photo graphers understand this,
And picture things
In ways only a camera can –

But oh, oh, if only
Someone COULD make a camera
Just like an eye…

I could share what I see,
Could show the world
Faintly eerie lights,
Instead of fiddling with a feeble retelling.

The most I can do is to tell you
To get a piece of knit fabric –
Big yarn, big knits –
Look through it at a sunset –
No. Not through it –
Look in front of it –
Look in it –
Where the lights of the sun shine upon and through,
Those faint, watery, wavering things in the knit gaps
That shine in place of seeing real things –

Those are a faint but fair image
Of what I see
When I just –

This is why I still wear glasses.
Easy to don,
Easy to remove –