आंखें · Eyes

English

She was never as beautiful
as she seemed when I looked today;
being and seeming are different things.
Her clear, white, open eyes,
the still pupils at their centre,
like a deep, open cave.
Suddenly I went all the way inside
and came back out.
Standing in a field I kept thinking:
perhaps a game was about to spring up in my own mind,
like the one I had once seen in her eyes.
Watching, she would ask, “What are you looking at?”
and quickly draw
a curtain over her eyes;
even as she hid it, everything showed.
But in these eyes there was nothing but openness,
not the openness I had seen
in the eyes of a girl standing at a red light,
begging in her helplessness,
her eyes empty as a well
to gather whatever your pity might give.
Her pupils were different again
from the ones I saw across the crossing,
open and still, but unable to see,
groping for light by sound
in a vast darkness.
And these eyes were quite different too
from the eyes of the bird that Morris Graves painted.
Where must that blind bird be wandering in this world,
where people lose their way even with eyes?