Great-Grandmother's Eyes Poem by michael hogan

Take this pen on your desk, for instance, or that chair by the window. Narrow your eyes until you see two pens or two chairs. Sometimes this can be done only at night or when you're quite tired. But once you see two of the object, say the chair, focus back to one, and now jump to two again. Do this several times. The chair will waver; it will ripple like cards being shuffled. Do not become frightened and make the mistake of holding to the belief that a chair cannot become other than itself. Instead flow with what you are seeing.
Let your mind accept that the chair is not a chair at all but a mere combination of light and motion that occasionally congeals into a chair then leaps apart into a frenzy of wood and fabric or ripples of dune grass from an off-shore wind.
The pattern of the upholstery swirls. It becomes the colors of your iris. It becomes brown with flecks of green, of gold. It becomes light which is the sun which is the color of blood inside your brain.
And the pattern of your present chemistry changes, too, with the light, with random combinations of molecules leaping synapses, with letting go and flowing with the chair, the way it moves until there is no chair but only you asleep dreaming of one which is first of all two chairs, then several, then your grandmother's lap and she is wearing a print dress, then your grandmother's mother whom you never knew but whose eyes were hazel or sometimes brown depending on what she was wearing and there were, your grandfather remembers, brilliant flecks of green, of gold.