During one of my last eye check-ups
before I learned he passed away,
the ophthalmologist who liked to have
his poodle nearby while he examined
patients said sotto voce, You may be
a candidate for early cataracts— And just
like that, I felt the edges of the room
fog up with clouds soft as the ringlets
of the dog sleeping fitfully in the corner,
one ear draped over a paw. The normally clear
lens of the eye, a little lake filled
with water and protein, turns
gradually murky with age: the color
of a milk tea pearl, the texture of an agar
pellet that didn't completely dissolve.
Sometimes, in the early stages, there will be
a sudden sharpness in near vision, a temporary
sense of "second sight." Then, as you drive
in the mountains at night looking for the right
fork in the road that will take you to the cabin
retreat you worked so long all year to get to,
the windshield blurs into a kind of impressionist
painting: behind it there could be a sky
reeling with stars, a gas station marquee;
the faded neon signs of the last La Quinta
or Starlite Motel, endless open stretches
before the next town comes into view.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for her manuscript Maps for Migrants and Ghosts, forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press in fall 2020. She is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.