Poetry Friday: The Sense of Sight

Today's Poetry Friday theme is one of vision...sight...the tricks our eyes play and the things we see and believe. Or don't believe.

Feel free to get all 20/20 on your blog post today with the theme of this sense...SIGHT...in whatever form pokes your eyeball with a sharp stick...poem, story, photo, ode to beauty, prescription debacle, sexysexysexy opposite-sex-thang.

Me, I actually wrote something today. I know! It was nice to stretch my fingers and my words for a change. And, of course, I had to include a video. 'Cause I'm all visual and shit.

Have a great weekend!


Fore. Sight.

Aisling was sure it was an accident. An illness, perhaps, or an unseen brain clot that got him. She was absolutely positive she was in her office, head-down, working on the financial reports.

But still, she heard the sound. The thump that mothers and detectives know as a body falling down. And not getting up.

The surgery had been a good thing at first. The cloudiness in her vision disappeared when the doctor took off the gauze, the headaches vanished, and she was able, for the first time in years, to get a good night’s sleep.

Except for that first night. The first night’s sleep scared her. The dream was entirely too vivid. The neighbor downstairs, the man who thumped at his-ceiling-her-floor with a mop handle whenever she turned on the television, the man who scowled at her in the lobby and dropped his cigar ashes outside her door to ruin the carpet, who muttered “cuntbitch” under his breath whenever he passed her in the hall. The neighbor who, in her dreams, she had smothered with his own dingy bed pillow. He was found the next morning, dead. Heart attack, said his daughter when she turned up to identify his body.

Except for that second night. When she woke with a start, standing fully clothed in her bedroom, making stabbing motions with her hands. She was bloodless. She wrapped her grandmother’s knitted afghan around her body and curled up at the foot of her bed. The papers the following day reported nineteen knife wounds in the body of man found round the corner. He was a grocer. He had a record.

Except for the third night. She dreamt of wings falling. Birds screaming. Her screaming. On her way to work that day the doorman told her to be careful if she came back late that night, especially if she crossed St. Anne’s churchyard. Sister Mary Catherine had gone to God. Aisling didn’t care. She wasn’t Catholic.

The thump in the office next to hers woke her from a stare. Her eyes were itchy again, like those first fitful nights at home. She didn’t dare rub them or she’d dislodge the delicate tubes still lodged in her tear ducts, the ones keeping everything from falling apart. She sipped her coffee, now cold, and looked at her hands. They were foreign to her somehow, meatier than she remembered. File…SaveAs…200809 YTD Financial Statement. She stretched her legs under her desk, inhaled deeply, and tried to decide…do I go next door and see if he’s dead? Or simply call 911?


I Can See Clearly: