His Eye

Somewhere where terrible things happen—
not here, though terrible things do happen—
but somewhere they happen more frequently
(and I read about this, I didn't see it first hand),
a boy was beaten so fiercely that one eyeball
fell out of his head, and he carried his own eye
safe in the palm of his hand over many miles
to the nearest doctor and begged the doctor
please to sew his eye back in its raw socket
but of course the doctor couldn't sew it back
(I suppose the optic nerve was severed and
who knows what all else) so that loose eye
was thrown out or buried, who knows which,
because that detail wasn't in the story I read,
but here's what I do know: forever afterward
the boy's hand, the hand that carried the eye,
was gifted with vision. If he touched a stone,
he knew the hidden inside color of that stone,
and when he grew up and touched a woman,
he knew, more fully than anyone else could,
all the untold dread that made her beautiful.

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Copyright © 2011 Penelope Scambly Schott All rights reserved
from New Guard Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission