Light chaff and falling leaves or a pair of feathers

on the ground can spook a horse who won’t flinch when faced

with a backhoe or a pack of Harleys. I call it “horse

ophthalmology,” because it is a different kind of system—

not celestial, necessarily, but vision in which the small,

the wispy, the lightly lifted or stirring threads of existence

excite more fear than louder and larger bodies do. It’s Matthew

who said that the light of the body is the eye, and that if

the eye is healthy the whole body will be full of light. Maybe

in this case “light” can also mean “lightness.” With my eyes of

corrupted and corruptible flesh I’m afraid I see mostly darkness

by which I mean heaviness. How great is that darkness? Not

as great as the inner weightlessness of horses whose eyes perceive,

correctly I believe, the threat of annihilation in every windblown

dust mote of malignant life. All these years I’ve been watching

out warily in obvious places (in bars, in wars, in night cities and

nightmares, on furious seas). Yet what’s been trying to destroy

me has lain hidden inside friendly-seeming breezes, behind

soft music, beneath the carpet of small things one can barely see.

The eye is also a lamp, says Matthew, a giver of light, bestower

of incandescent honey, which I will pour more cautiously

over the courses I travel from now on. What’s that whisper?

Just the delicate sweeping away of somebody’s life.