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Seeing Things
Browbeaten by the sun, Squinting, and long since out of focus yourself In a sharp-edged, keen-eyed world, you take whatever looms Or lords it over you Or spills its rippling lakes across this desert More placidly than those expecting to feel cold sober. You know that shimmer of water Isn't for you, will keep a critical distance Like grazing antelope sidling from your approaches. You know that heavenly mansion Hanging upside down or having it both ways To a pinnacle is a shack or boulder beyond the horizon Where you would spend hard times. You know the delectable mountains like layer cakes Are twice as far away as they seem and completely inedible. But your fondness for light, For the earth's unlimited metamorphoses, Should help you go along with its disguises, shifting (But not uneasily) The burden of proof to the eyes of other beholders Who don't know what you are, who may be seeing you now As a menacing, blurred afrit, A towering apparition wobbling toward them Helplessly, their last hope, their disillusionment.