The Migrational Patterns of Eyewear

inks on paper, drawn/painted without glasses

If you’ve been visiting my blog for a while you will doubtless have witnessed my complaints about dwindling eyesight, an obvious handicap for an artist. So I took my frustration out on a poem, which I then shared at an open mic night with the Olympia Poetry Network. Afterward several people came up and told me their stories about errant glasses (and eyes), and I felt ever so much better. 

But I’ve never shared my poetry here without the art which inspired it. So in keeping with the purpose of this blog, I painted my experience of the poem. . .and did it without the help of glasses (since they were before me on the table). And that made me feel better too! because imprecise as it is, it proves that I can see more or less without the glasses. So today they have just a little less power over my happiness than before. 

If you want to stick around for the poem, you’ll understand what I mean. And I’d be happy to read your glasses story too, if you want to share it!

The Migrational Patterns of Eyewear

Do your glasses have a will of their own

Or do you plant them on your face in the morning, 

After a careful course of cleaning 

then go about your day with no further thought of them

Until you tuck them away at night

Mine are the willful sort

And there are several pair

Each with their own statement of style and comfort

Highly specialized in application

Like  university professors with their precious academic niche

They will not condescend to participate 

In a generalists mentality

The round blue ones are the scholars that prefer

Close study in a comfortable chair

The only ones that will sit with a book and then

Only with excellent lighting or Kindle-ing in bed 

They prefer their perch on the bedside table, 

occasionally migrate to the living room but

Are affronted when finding themselves in the bathroom

The more stylish copper rimmed glasses

Are not bothered by their computer moniker but

Prefer the painter reference

They perch comfortably lower on the nose

Which contributes to them being disagreeably

Carried to other areas . . .like outside. . .

where they become instantly useless

Which leads to the progressive glasses

With their hopes of becoming the one and only 

Their false claim to being multifocal

Leads to frequent humiliation when

Confronted with a small but essential 

line of text or online bill paying  or,

On going outside with its longer vistas,

Now quivering, spongy and unreal,

To sudden stomach lurches

On days when the three pairs converge

Like siblings awaiting dinner at kitchen counter

I am elsewhere sightless and not amused

By their migrational fickleness

Yet they are after all a family

With their own set of complaints about

Me