Gail Wronsky

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.