Sight

Now I’m told
your newly opening eyes
can detect light, and that, if I were to hold
that light to my stomach, you’d hold
your fists to your eyes as any of us would do.
Your sight marvels at its lack
of focus, the fluid view
as shapeless as your swollen vision
outlined only in sound.
I hear that celestial rush the first time
they put the wand to my stomach,
your whole body
in the uneasy guttering fluid.
I try to imagine you among those ghostly echoes,
turning pulse to picture.
Is this the same as those nights when as a child
I’d stand in the unlit hallway convinced
I saw movement, some unearthly thing
that sent me running back to bed?
Or how I willed
little swirls of colored dots
to appear in the dark room just as my eyes
shut down, forgetting the day.
So essential our need for something to take shape.
It seems I can hardly know
what’s happening, deceptive thaw, a body
readying itself. And so I’m left to imagine
the instant when you blink and turn
in my transparent fluid, lost
to any kind of light, your own particular joy
at seeing nothing, knowing not yet
how to call the darkness.