I hear you lost your eye in The War,
though that is like saying
you lost your eye playing Scrabble or
wrestling wild beasts in the Serengeti.
We, perched on wooden stools inside,
licking foam from four dollar nonfat Chais,
are far removed from any of “The Wars.”
It is easier for us to imagine you
bent over a battlefield of cardboard
scrutinizing letters.

So let’s say that you lost your eye
playing Scrabble. It must have been
one hell of a game. Having not yet
surrendered to the advancing gray or
abandoned your razor to rust, you would
still not be handsome but perhaps
stronger, your eyes secure
and unremarkable.

You must have noticed, then, only sight —
perfect, seemingly independent
from the rods and cones, the lens and vitreous.
You would have scouted the board easily.
You would have picked sleep
from the corners of your eyes
to buy time. You would not have wondered
if an eyeball squashes like a grape.

I like you as a Scrabble player
more than as a soldier. Besides,
you look harmless enough, now,
with your black coffee and croissant, an old novel,
Conrad, resting open and stained, to your right.
Your opponent must have been petty,
the kind of man who talks through his teeth.

Maybe he had a mustache that curled up
at the ends like fishhooks that you wished
would just once cut through his cheek.
You imagined he would get by
without a tongue as you reached
into the black bag, passing over squares.
You’d write soldier into oxen
and caress a W like something illicit. Oxen
would lead into grenade, soldier
into nostril, nostril into swan.

I don’t know what weapon
your opponent used, or what,
provoked him — jealousy,
blood lust, pride, some arrangement
of events causing his blood
to move faster, his ribs to constrict, his breath
to catch — but I imagine he first threw
the board onto your lap and that your left eye
held on to the image of all those letters
tossed up and frozen in the air as though
hanging by an umbilical cord.

My question is this: How long
before your left eye surrendered to the pull
and became, simply, something other than itself —
no longer your left eye but
tissue, debris, shrapnel — and
could you hear the optic nerve snap?

I hear you lost your eye in The War, but
I hear other things too,
like that you used to tell people their futures, your
glass eye secretly a crystal ball, that
you’re a poet and that you were once
young and worked for the circus.

Between sips I imagine that young you and then
the you, now, getting up from your corner table.
You would tuck Conrad into your jacket
and ground yourself with your good eye,
calculating the contour of the sidewalk
while, in your glass eye, in the pocket
at the edge of sight, you would catch letters
sprouting wings or the road
blooming into rhododendrons or
the whole damn town exploding
into triple word scores.