Eye

The beholder is in the eye of beauty: contained and separate like the first cold day of the year.
Up close, you see that the beholder has a tiny eye as well – a scuff, a dot-within-a-dot

small as the kiss of a needle. It does not blink. If you could look that hard, you might begin
to see your own eye gazing back at you with all the things you’ve seen collecting underneath

in dunes, the way we come to find ourselves everywhere & even in those things
we promised we would stare at properly to see them as they are, removed from us;

the dropped coin of the lake in wintertime, a street you can’t live on at dawn, a hill
you’re sure you’ve never climbed before, even the face you suddenly can’t bear

to be without, the soft shock of it, the bright iris, the disappointment when you
lean in close enough to see yourself, unchanging, held.