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In the Street Without My Glasses

By Harry Bauld

Blur sips at the blue bowl
of morning. The heart,

old mole, noses forward
to sense something of steel, maybe

of stone—without a lens the filth
is gone. Unrefracted men and women

regress toward a trembling Monet mean,
trees and marquees go dumb

in the warble of sky,
and even nameless cars

dodging their promised manslaughters
gleam like starlings

under bus faces smeared
to leaf and petal. Someone crosses

the street, a tremolo
of arm, a shudder of color

smoothed to one age, race and sex
as light as that shadow

shimmering off the asphalt
like distant desert heat, the true flicker

we may be. The world
before the uncorrected eye

brims, marbles, quivers
over its boundaries, wells.