Lost to View

A range of clouds banked up behind the peak
Of that apocryphal
Blue mountain, with a wide, oblique
Burst of late sun
Projecting at the east’s receding wall

A film of what the day so far has done:
A wind that tries to scrape
The breaking waves up as they run
Across the bay
And shatter at the foot of Fluted Cape

In tern and gannet-printed veils of spray;
And trees the wind has caught,
Which seem too self-contained to sway
When they are blown,
And only move as a pleasing afterthought.

No one. No human presence has been known,
Surely, to venture here.
It takes one blackbird to disown
That vagary
And, whistling just a few feet from his ear,

To call him back again and make him be
The subject in this scene,
The one who is required to see.
Another day,
No blackbird with its song will intervene.

The spray will hang its veils and the trees sway.

Saccade

They have no sense of what they’re looking at,
Unless the object moves.
(Or so he’s read; who knows if that’s the case?)
A painted bird’s an empty analogue
To the oblivious cat.
And it is not his still familiar face
So much as that distinctive gait which proves
The master to his dog,
Who frolics for him like an acrobat.

His eyes need movement too, but make their own.
His most fixated gaze —
On one small figure in a Bruegel scene,
Or on the camber of his lover’s lip
He worships unbeknown,
As though no time or change will supervene —
Aflicker with saccade, adjusts and strays
Minutely to equip
His mind to take in what is being shown.

And maybe consciousness employs saccade
As well, and flickers back
And forth, now in the world, now, briefly, out —
The way the gum tree’s canopy overhead
Flickers with light and shade,
So every leaf is momently in doubt —
Its faith saved by such intermittent lack
From being surfeited,
Its constant sense being constantly unmade.