I can’t remember the last time I threw my head back like this.
The cardboard black-lensed frames are supposed to go over your glasses but they don’t fit over my gigantic hexagonal frames, which are gigantic on purpose because I need their prisms to compensate for the fourth cranial nerve palsy that causes me, has always caused me to see double, and the bigger the frames, the more of my field of vision they correct. There’s already a poem somewhere about how my first lesson in existentialism came at age 5 when I learned that not everyone sees a transparent and movable facsimile of the object on which their eyes focus when they tilt their head a certain way. Just me. Anyway, NASA only says you should put the eclipse glasses over your regular glasses and I don’t have an astronomer on speed-dial to ask whether I have to hold the things over my glasses for the length of the whole production, or if it’s safe to wear them underneath. I don’t really know the mysterious physics of eclipses, don’t really know how it all works, but I picture a pipsqueak with a magnifying glass harnessing the sun to incinerate ants to death, except the ants are my eyes. So I figure I’ll just take off my prescription glasses and wear the things properly. My eyesight is pretty clear, all things considered, so it’s okay to take the specs off for about the length of a shower without causing an eye-strain headache. I go up to the roof of my office in Long Island City, take my glasses off and put on this UV-friendly masquerade mask, something I won’t have a reason to do for another forty years (if I make it that long.) These ersatz glasses are 100,000 times stronger than regular sunglasses. So most of what you see is black. In the center there is a bright orange crescent like a fat waxing cracker dipped in melted cheddar. It’s a neat trick, these celestial bodies suspended in a cosmic dance, but it doesn’t really warrant the hype. But wait– the double. Just below and off to the left is a carbon copy, and as I move it moves with me. And unlike when I’m looking straight ahead, when I’m looking up at the sky like this I can spin and spin and the double never disappears, only dances, the real helio remaining centric all the while. I have gone from disability to superpower in the time it takes for Clark Kent to transform with the power of accessories. Here I am, an important adult among important adults all thronged together with our advanced degrees everyone stationary, staring at the sky, and me here twirling round and round in the kind of twirls only little girls in flowy skirts understand. Twirling so that the second eclipse revolves around the real one which stays put in the middle like it’s the actual damn sun, which it is. Twirling, amazed that even for a moment I forgot what my own body can do. The path of totality is just to the west. Like death it always seems to miss me by a hair. Somewhere else there are people taking off the glasses and looking directly at the sun’s luminous corona framing a black orb. But I’m fine right where I am. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. Because what could be more spectacular than your very own built-in kaleidoscope sitting on either side of your nose? Here I am, in love with my lazy eyes. This can’t be a poem. It’s too obvious. Garish, bursting with its own symbolism like an overripe mango, like a cartoon rabbit with an oversized mallet, like the image of god on your toast, like a total eclipse. Comments are closed.
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Meesh Montoya
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