Diagnosis: Retinoschesis

In one photograph, they wear sweaters,
and in another, pointy Santa hats.
Poor vision doesn’t make me see them.
Truly doubles, they are reassuring,
on the wall, the twins of the optometrist.

He fires air-jets in my eyes, and spins
sets of lenses while I read the alphabet,
which, he echoes, make vision better.
The tiniest row of letters seem Cyrillic.
Where does the other language start?

Soon the consonants become vowels
then a numerology too remote to count,
except one character, hooked like chaos,
symbol for Saturn, presiding over lead.
He asks me: circle, counter-clockwise, east

to west -- to my right the twins are happy.
They lean in an identical direction.
Wearing matching sweaters and caps,
they’re nested in another like dolls
or cosmonauts packed in a Soyuz.

He diagnoses blisters under my eyes.
They lie beneath each one like chaos
cradles a planet -- a chaos that pools
to sea or teary source or Murine deluge,
space without circumference, a mess.

If the blisters grow, I will see shadows
or blinding white flashes of epiphany
but neither walk nor drive--that’s why
when things are black, the squiggles
reassure me: blood vessels, he urges,
gelatinous, packed, outracing thought
or UFOs in grainy 16 millimeters.

But when I rub eyes, I see sunspots
that augur heat-blasts. And do not look
at sunlight say voices. The flash itself
will float on water -- as creation floats
on a ridge of bone or razor-back of giant,
or a flood of tears, the final source

for this anointment dilating my pupils.
How appealing the steel-rimmed glasses
as walls within the eye-store wobble.
They will hold my head like barrel-hoops.
The assistant reminds me don’t drive,

advice I disregard in open country,
the constellations undisturbed by traffic,
where twins are archetypes, not twins
of the optometrist. I fail to see things
but as dotted lines, suggestive, bare --

too remote to scrutinize, unlike sunspots
my fingers press on this wrinkled microcosm.
The sky suggests a bow, an arrow-shaft,
or limb attached to torso nebulae barely clothe,
or things I can turn off, blanks refuse to fill

like metaphysical things, or like chaos,
which beneath appearance, isn’t really true,
because what’s underneath is really ordered
on a microscopic level -- those squiggles
for which lenses or tea-leaves are needless

make sense, being neither magic, nor UFOs
nor private, like palm-lines, birthmarks or scars.
They’ve been allotted to others as eyes have
or identical twins, those circling peas in pods.
If vision gets too terrible, can’t he lance them
with those ruby lasers used for rifle scopes?