Improvement by Danusha Laméris

The optometrist says my eyes
are getting better each year.
Soon he’ll have to lower my prescription.
What’s next? The light step I had at six?
All the gray hairs back to brown?
Skin taut as a drum?

My improved eyes and I
walked around town and celebrated.

We took in the letters
of the marquee, the individual leaves
filling out the branches of the sycamore,
an early moon.

So much goes downhill: our joints
wearing out with every mile,
the delicate folds of the eardrum
exhausted from years of listening.
I’m grateful for small victories.

The way the heart still beats time
in the cathedral of the ribs.

And the mind, watching its parade of thoughts
enter and leave, begins to see them
for what they are: jugglers, fire swallowers, acrobats
tossing their batons in the air.

Improvement

I like the light touch Laméris gives to being told her eyesight is improving, going further to imagine other extravagant possibilities – her original-coloured hair, the smooth unwrinkled skin of youth, perhaps the light step I had at six. These fanciful ideas don’t sound to me like a longing to return to younger years, simply a playful imagining.

As she walks about with her newly upgraded eyes, she takes in the individual leaves, a pale moon in the daylight sky, things we might easily miss without this fresh appreciation for what we can see with greater attention. So much goes downhill as she says, and as we all start to notice in time, the cushioning in our joints thinning, our ears exhausted from years of listening. Oh those delicate folds of the eardrum!

Yet, she is grateful for small victories, especially this one: The way the heart still beats time / in the cathedral of the ribs. Isn’t that a magnificent image, our faithfully beating heart in that holy vaulted space! Then she points out how our thoughts, when we begin to notice, are jugglers, fire-swallowers, acrobats. We start to see how they are tricksters, shysters who distract us from what is present in the moment. Perhaps we can all improve our vision by seeing what is right in front of us now.