The Eye-Mote
Blameless
as daylight I stood looking
At a field
of horses, necks bent, manes blown,
Tails
streaming against the green
Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking
White
chapel pinnacles over the roofs,
Holding the
horses, the clouds, the leaves
Steadily
rooted though they were all flowing
Away to the
left like reeds in a sea
When the
splinter flew in and stuck my eye,
Needling it dark. Then I was seeing
A melding
of shapes in a hot rain:
Horses
warped on the altering green,
Outlandish
as double-humped camels or unicorns,
Grazing at
the margins of a bad monochrome,
Beasts of oasis, a better time.
Abrading my
lid, the small grain burns:
Red cinder
around which I myself,
Horses,
planets and spires revolve.
Neither
tears nor the easing flush
Of eyebaths
can unseat the speck:
It sticks,
and it has stuck a week.
I wear the
present itch for flesh,
Blind to
what will be and what was.
I dream
that I am Oedipus.
What I want
back is what I was
Before the
bed, before the knife,
Before the
brooch-pin and the salve
Fixed me in
this parenthesis;
Horses
fluent in the wind,
A place, a time gone out of mind.
Sylvia Plath (1959)