On Looking: Essays Read Online Free Page B

work on me. And recording, recording, recording. I am not her parent and so do not feel guilt. I am not her sister and so do not feel that dual reprieve/protectiveness. I call up the warmth of such an arm in my hand (I don’t know if she says “stump”), the curve, the balance, its abrupt end, and the ghost of its missing length. I feel, like a child, neither moral nor immoral saying this. I feel many things.
    When the eye sees something beautiful the hand wants to draw it.
    Or here’s another way to say it: a poem should not mean, but be.
     
     
    There is not, as many think, any air at all in a jellyfish, just organized cilia and bell muscles, a gelatinous scaffolding for hydrostatic propulsion. These simplest drifters are like bubbles of milky glass—and who doesn’t want to see through to a thing’s inner workings, the red nerves, and blood and poison with a clear pulse, circulating. And yet one scientist says, “When thinking of jellies we have to suspend our bias towards hard skeletons with thick muscles and dense tissues.” He means in order to see their particular beauty, to see them , we have to suspend our fear. We have to love contraction. Filtration. The word “gelatinous,” too. The words “scull” and “buoyancy” are easy. We have to suspend “mucus web.” And realize that their bioluminescence, which is a show to see at night, is used to confuse and startle prey. You can look right through them. As if into a lit front room when it’s night outside.
    Of course, we peer into houses at night not because they’re beautiful, but because we want to see what’s going on in there—illuminated, partial, and beckoning.
     
     
    I’ve carried this image for a long time now: the port-wine birthmark on the girl’s pale face. All that summer at the beach, the mark was like a harbor, or what I knew of the shore, growing up near the ocean as I did. Tidal, it crept up near her eye and stayed like a dampness. I felt I was supposed to separate that color—velvety, royal, berrylike—from its place: her face, where it shouldn’t be. But I could not get the color to be unlovely. And I could not remove the mark from her face.
     
     
    Magda, who worked at my favorite lunch counter in Warsaw, had the lovely, plain face of a farm girl. When she laughed, her white teeth shone and the scar in the middle of her chin puckered. And when she looked past me, into the distance, one eye rolled to the side. Her left eye was fixed in place during our conversations as she ladled out the borscht with beans I ordered every day. And every day, I’d wait to see it slip away—the whiteness, the angle, the variation: the hand wants to draw it. If that which is beautiful is balanced and symmetrical, a “pleasing unity,” then the unbeautiful’s more a form of interruption—like a gasp. A catch in breath. The unbeautiful’s a form made of interruptions—a rough hand passed over wool’s nap, snagging. And passed over again and again for the snag. It’s a moment that catches your attention. It’s a moment into which you fall, as when on a crowded bus, hot crowded subway, you forget yourself and enter some other, less populated world by an unexpected door: a woman’s earlobe, deeply notched; the close back of a man’s neck, oily and creased; a girl’s cracked lip; a freckle; a boil; a split thumbnail with its crescent of dirt, next to which your own nail rests on the cool, aluminum pole.

Recurrences/Concurrences
     
    C onditions are present.
    Frost on the bathroom window this morning burgeons and twines in winged fleurs-de-lis. Astonishing frost on this, the same morning I discover my mother’s old cigarette case: the same, precise blooms but in silver-etched motion. How the mind of frost, the form reaches out, draws its heirs close: from anywhere, cracked riverbeds and leaf-veins in sun. From a few blocks away, wrought-iron fish on the Roland Park schoolyard fence. From childhood, Dead Man’s Fingers, Codium