For this, still-fingered, I focused
my blue microscope until the fish’s translucent scale
filled the fine lens’ curved view.
What were the rays that shuddered to the scale’s rim?
So onionlike, so much like my own iris’s black lines
that tremble to my eye-white’s inner edge?
Between the glass slide’s surface and the lens’s curve
it was as though another, finer eye
stared up at me. I, who have never been
the subject of anything, was the world
into which it looked and what it saw came from myself.
I thought about my own eye’s perfect brown.
When, finally, I lifted my head,
my lab, which once seemed ordered, white, bottle-lined,
caught the brilliant light
that passed through the room’s high windows.