Floaters
My eyes have
made small islands in their sea
that float between me
and what I want to be there,
all desired clear
but now obscured,
invisible for what they are,
and never heard.
Palm trees instead of paragraphs,
not faces, forms, but homemade rafts
drifting across a wavy film, not words,
but blind reality.
November 2021
posted for Meeting the Bar
at dVerse Poets
Images: Clouds In Finland, 1908 © Konrad Kryzanowski, Public Domain
Boat, c.1918 © Salvador Dali Public Domain
A great take on the prompt - drifting towards those paradise islands of the mind!
ReplyDeleteI love your very clever double entendre here. Those motes in the eye often do seem to be something lazing in a peaceful sea, and we can wish ourselves into that picture of our own devise. More immediate, and less circumscribed than linear reality (as in lines on a page), we become sailors keen to take to sea and the feeling overwhelms whatever prosaic object may actually stand before us. Or so I read.
ReplyDeleteThanks Shay. Your read is quite literal, and quite you, and quite right, too. Thanks for taking the time to look into the lines as they float by.
DeleteWhat a grand conceit! Floaters as "homemade rafts": indeed they are, unconscious thoughts and ideas "floating" towards formulated words and desired constructs, invisible but there all the same.
ReplyDeletepax,
dora
A very clever poem, with reaĺ imagery...well done..
ReplyDeleteIslands as barriers .. I had never considered the possibility, obscured or otherwise .. until now.
ReplyDeleteOh, this one resonated! Recently I have been experiencing floaters in one eye and your poetic take on these motes is absolutely fabulous.
ReplyDeleteA true conceit which twists internally in an odd direction (creating, I suppose, an even more diabolickal fancy): What one "wants to see" may be for clear sight, or the desire to see what one wishes to. Do the floaters obscure reality, or desire? What do floaters "obscure," make "invisible for what they are, / and never heard"? Is it the imagination which clouds with "blind reality", obscuring what pal Stevens saw as the "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is"? If "palm trees" replace "paragraphs" and "forms" replace "faces," then are floaters bane or deliverance? Devilish stuff and suggesting that the way we see it ain't the way it's seen at all. Well done H, leaving me with thoughts whose keels will not heel.
ReplyDeleteThanks, B. That's exactly what I was trying to express with my little conceit. What's there is never what we want, but is it what we think? maybe if we could actually, you know, *see* it? we would know. Appreciate the insights, and sorry to keel your haul.
Delete"Palm trees instead of paragraphs,
ReplyDeletenot faces, forms, but homemade rafts"
love all those images, and your sounds just float. couldn't help but start to daydream as i was reading this the first time, second time i started thinking about seeing what i want to see, the world as we want to see it, the world as we think we see it, and the world as it is, and the world as it really is. enjoyed your rorschach poem joy
ok, ignore that last "world as we really see it", lost track of where i was in that thought =)
DeleteIt all works for me, phillip. Thanks for reading. I'm glad you enjoyed it.
DeleteRead and re-read this one a number of times, I like the way it twists and turns and extends the metaphor and how it works both lierally and metaphorically! JIM
ReplyDeleteI really liked the wonderful way you can turn something as scary as floaters to something so wonderful... palm trees instead of paragraphs. That said I hope you check up those floaters...
ReplyDeletetried commenting on phone the other day and it wouldn't take. visiting post coffee this morning (trying to shake the woken headache) with rubbed eyes full of my own doubts and floaters.
ReplyDeleteI remember times wondering if anyone else saw floaters, those little squiggles inside-close, so it doesn't surprise me you did/ do, with your eye for the details (pun not intended) of blind reality. ~
Thanks, M. I hate trying to comment with my phone. When I was young, my first one terrified me. Now they just hide and distort, but then adult life is full of that sort of thing.
DeleteI like the take on blind reality as if our eyes have blinders and seeing:
ReplyDeletePalm trees instead of paragraphs,
not faces, forms, but homemade rafts
Love the details of the floaters and leaves one food for thought.