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.