Snapshot with Red Eye

I was looking to my left, when whoever it was who took the picture
took the picture. Unblinking, my eyes glow

with an infernal light, focused on somebody
or something outside the world of the photo, my gaze

sailing off the edge, like ships before Columbus. They say the back
of the eye is unique in each of us, an unforgeable

signature of blood and nerve, the scribbled tracery
of the retina as individual as the tightly furrowed

whorls of finger and thumb. In spy movies,
they always have scanners at the entrances to secret labs,

where a red beam looks into your eyes,
the way the laser at the supermarket reads the price

off the barcode. In high school, Mr. Wood,
my physics teacher, told us about how the pupils

in our eyes are like lenses, inverting and reversing
the world, projecting the narrow beam of the visible

upside down on the back of the eye, and the brain,
which knows better than to believe everything it’s told,

makes everything right again, translating the eyes’ outlandish
tale of a world that’s been turned on its head,

a dream-like place that is, at once, precisely and not at all
the one we think we know. And then there are those tribes

you always hear about, who don’t want to have their pictures taken,
because they believe the camera will steal their souls.

And maybe they’re right: maybe what we fear
is that while we’re not looking, the camera will flash,

and someone will see into our eyes to the place
where we see, unlike any other,

and there, the camera will find that secret name, the one
we didn’t know we have, scrawled, like graffiti, upside down

and backward in a wild and alien script on a wall
that no one was ever meant to see.

For Those Who Paint with Small Brushes

For those who paint with small brushes, the wayward
    twistings of leaf and stem and the scored

surfaces of rock and the way sunlight strikes the pink lips
    of geranium petals in the late afternoon

mean that the world sustains scrutiny. They know,
    these painters with small brushes,

the way a fruitbowl presses into a tablecloth,
    lemons and white linen stiff with starch,

and the way elm trees in November press on the sky,
    their stretching limbs resisting the call

of the earth in arrested gestures of freedom and longing.
    They know the way the shadows of cumuli

move across the sides of mountains, rippling
    and waving like banners, the way

seed pearls of light flash from the taut skins of grapes,
    dulled purple and dark. And because art

can kill, because life won’t wait for art to save it,
    those who paint with small brushes

know the way a lemon shrivels, its bright rind drying
    into crusty scurf—or the way bananas

ferment in the brown coffins of their own skin.
    They know the way the canvas will sag,

burdened finally by the weight of the paint that will crack
    and fade—and they know too, at the end

of each day, the heady smell of turpentine, sweet and dizzy,
    as they clean, one by one, their brushes, working

the fine, shimmering bristles between finger and thumb.
    When these painters return to us, hands tingling

and cool from evaporating pine spirit, when they awaken
    from the world of their invention

and imitation, they walk like ghosts, pretending,
    as they move among us, that they too

inhabit the bright, featureless world of our blithe
    inattention. Later, when they close

their eyes in search of sleep, these painters know the weight
    of paint on a brush and the nubby texture

of canvas, and, deep and low in their backs, they know
    the ache of their slow praise and careful

mourning, and they know too that their paintings,
    like rubbings of old gravestones,

may tell us almost nothing we want to know
    about the living or the dead.

Chris Cunningham has a a B.A. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from Duke University.  His critical essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Arizona Quarterly, Mississippi Quarterly, The Black Warrior Review, and The
Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from the Frost Place, Vol. II (CavanKerry). He teaches English at The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, where he lives with his
wife and two children.

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