The Mind’s Eye

By Alison Pick
Collage by Shaun Morin

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“Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.”
– Martin Heidegger

“Beauty is not caused. It is.”
– Emily Dickinson

WINTER LANDSCAPE

The snowshoe dreams a frozen lake
in the way the mind dreams thought –
pulling itself inside out, a mitten
drying next to a campfire. You’ve crossed

the ice like memory: turning, turning and
doubling back. Finding your way,
losing it again. Spruce bear witness,
arms thrown up. The snowshoe dreams

a quiet mind where breaking trail leaves
no mark, a sharpened cold as dusk drifts in
like wood smoke over the lake.
You draw your knees up to your chest,

hold yourself as night holds day.
The final light leaks out. It leaves
its pink and gentleness on the snow
you’ve come across: the broken surface
thinking leaves. The endless criss-crossed tracks.

HOW THINGS CHANGE

The day plumps up with what’s undone.
It rises like dough; we punch it back down.
We save our kisses in a safe that’s fat and pink
but won’t say oink, so we exact
a recursion to bed. We pull the blankets
over our heads, which makes the darkness
no more dark. The pet we don’t own
nuzzles her face into our choice:
move home, or don’t. Nothing moves
until a shadow lifts a finger, as in thought. You think,
for a minute, this may be enough, and then,
in the end, it isn’t.

HISTORY

The black sleeve of history turned up at the cuff.
A flash of red silk underneath.
Say it’s the red of someone’s umbrella,
a woman at the bus stop, already late.
Say the rain is pocking the gutter, the gutter rushing
like what’s been called fate. Empedocles visioned
the start of the world as chaos
with body parts floating around it.
Think of pure blackness; a foot sailing past.
At the far end of town a man turns his keys,
backs down the driveway, craning behind him.
The woman gives up and decides she will walk.
The rain is still falling like what’s coming next:
at some point the foot will collide with a leg.
The windshield is streaming with streaks of long red.
The man hits the brakes and the car hydroplanes
into a version of what we expect, the smack
of a male body up against female. The glue was called love,
Empedocles said. We’d call it chance. The church
called it fate in 1831. Say that’s the year:
a man boards a ship. He’s bound for a different
future entirely. Restless and bored, unmoored and drifting,
his uncle has pushed him to take the job.
He’s pleased with his title, repeats it to himself.
Charles Darwin: captain’s companion.

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION WINDS DOWN

Mechanistic physics: your body
a clock, your dark arms ticking
down the time, as though

the round white face
of the moon was built by human
hands. To see this clearly

is to see a tiny bulb behind
the brain that holds the thought
of size and shape

and lights up when we touch.
You can be the well-oiled gear;
I’ll be the stick tossed into

your gleaming. I’ll be the heart
behind the workbench, slowly
descending to rust.

THE METAMORPHOSES’ METAMORPHOSIS

It would be easy to say I’m the violet.
To say my face follows you morning to night
like vegetal Clytie’s face follows Apollo. To pluck
the purple from its stem would be to revise
the colour of envy. Let’s take Ovid
at face value, trail his arc across the horizon, the way

a harder and violent desire trails
a spell of relief. Every myth wants into the next
and in this wanting settles its fate:
picked from the mouth and placed in a glass
it soon grows green with a kind of regret.
And death obscures the truth of the story
like breath obscures the tongue.

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