At Sea

It is not through weeping,

but all evening the pale blue eye

on your most photogenic side has kept

its own unfathomable tide. Like the boy

at the dyke I have been there:

held out a huge finger,

lifted atoms of dust with the point

of a tissue and imagined slivers of hair

in the oil on the cornea. We are both

in the dark, but I go on

drawing the eyelid up by its lashes

folding it almost inside-out, then finding

and hiding every mirror in the house

as the iris, besieged with the ink

of blood rolls back

into its own orbit. Nothing

will help it. Through until dawn

you dream the true story of the boy

who hooked out his eye and ate it,

so by six in the morning

I am steadying the ointment

that will bite like an onion, piping

a line of cream while avoiding the pupil

and in no time it is glued shut

like a bad mussel.

Friends call round

and mean well. They wait

and whisper in the air-lock of the lobby

with patches, eyewash, the truth

about mascara.

Even the cats are on to it;

they bring in starlings, and because their feathers

are the colours of oil on water in sunlight

they are a sign of something.

In the long hours

beyond us, irritations heal

into arguments. For the eighteenth time

it comes to this: the length of your leg sliding out

from the covers, the ball of your foot

like a fist on the carpet

while downstairs

I cannot bring myself to hear it.

Words have been spoken; things that were bottled

have burst open and to walk in now

would be to walk in

on the ocean.