THE OCULARIST by Alise Alousi

The man bent over the new eye, drew its capillaries.
He graduated from art school, but seemed normal.

Collared shirt, task lamp, face round and serious
as my father’s. He knew I dated artists, 

but the room was small, and there was no time for that dance.
He shook his pen, made it rattle. 

I thought of a snake curled in a shoe. 
As a child, we differed on what was normal.

I wanted to play outside; my father called it
running the streets. I imagine myself then, winged,

a knotty -haired girl, swift, limbs and clothes loose.
Ayuni, he’d beg on his gentler days, shaking his head.

I’d pretend I didn’t see him, follow the shadows
that asked me to dance. The first days after surgery 

my father could see through his eye’s absence, 
a swirl of colors. Once a famous writer told me 

that’s where she found poems—behind her 
closed eyes visions waited like people exiting a train.

His, replaced by a black patch when he danced 
at my brother’s wedding. His last months, I tried

to make things seem normal, removed the eye 
with a small suction cup, held it under water, 

cleaned into its perfect curve. In its absence, 
red and white streaks looked back at me.

We stopped spending time with the details. 
The deep brown-black cornea, its fixed pupil.

Unless one studied hard, they wouldn’t find its flaw:
it didn’t move. I think of this person I met only once

like a still-life painting, among the glistening fruit,
the sliver of the everyday, their memory, an anomaly. 

The small brick building on a busy road I drive by.
Imagine a man inside, a row of eyes before him to perfect. 

The challenge unchanging as the palette 
of grays, greens, brown, blacks and blues. 

How to match what’s gone,
save the last bit of his art for the veins.