(Published in the Winter 2014 issue of VoiceCatcher)

Focal Distance

The camera is an instrument that teaches people to see without a camera

 – Dorthea Lange

If you let me, I’ll teach you to see.

Hold my inelegant lens to your

own fluid eye and the world

becomes clear.

Don’t ask me why its reduction

lets you breathe.

Is it all too much?  The scope, 

the endless directions you could look,

close-up or wide angle,

panorama?

No wonder you need my small window,

dials, settings, focusing rings,

a once-lively moment captured and stilled.

Maybe you need the shattering 

brightness condensed to a slivered dance of light.  

A sliver is all I can give. 

I envy your involuntary blink,

The way your pupils accept 

without strategy or manipulation

the illumined shimmer

on grass blades, window panes,

glancing the water’s surface like

a million gold pennies.

I envy the ease of images entering,

folding themselves into secrets you

keep for later.

I am not a shield.  Never meant to close you off,

keep you separate.  If I could trade

my thick curved glass for the breathing 

pulse of eyes then 

I’d hold mine open, 

welcome the pang 

of light and color,

watch the fractured world made whole.