Trust What You Hear  Charlie Schubert

 

 

             1

I never realized that vision was a bird,

until it spread its wings across

the windshield and tried to fly away.

   

White lights became owl feathers

dancing among red bodies, large

and blurred like stars that have been

taken down with tongs, to be cooled

in the ocean.

 

              2

Night shrinks before all these spreading

points of light.   Faces look ridiculous

edged in lines painted by a child's watercolor.

  

I try to brush away the ink

that runs from their faces, or the spots

of dust that accumulate behind my cornea,

a lens warped, ruined

by years of uneven heating and cooling.