At Forty

Pattern or absence of pattern, the way a jet flies into blankness yet leaves a clear trail, I expect time to reveal an underdrawing, hatching of shadows, some rough plan visible through another spectrum of light. Once, at an ophthalmologist’s office, through an accident of mirrors, I saw the interior of my own eye, the retina’s veins like roots or a web, and then again ten years later, this time in an astronomy book—galaxies, clusters of galaxies, superclusters of galaxies strung out strands of a cosmic web, the redness of that image, the light extending like roots 13 billion years in every direction. Michelangelo could see a figure in a block of stone, waiting to be freed. I want his vision when I look in a mirror, his mathematical principles for depicting space, his ability to translate three dimensions into stone. First I’m in two dimensions, a photograph glued to the glass; then three—I’m somewhere between the glass and the background. All my houses, friends come and gone. How would he sculpt me? How far out of the stone have I come?