I Was Looking Into Your Eye Poem by Deborah DeNicola

looking into the tight skein of skin around your eye,
the folds, a flake, a freckle, that fiftyish
shift in the crows' feet, expanding bends and dents
and shadowed gutters then back to the rich copper,
denuded eye, without the frame of its usual lens.
How vulnerable it is, more so than from a distance
when you are handsome and pensive, a bit out of focus.
In the loft of your cheekbone, the mottled sun-
spanked skin, pulled at an intersection of pigment
and damage. And your blink, the animal caged
under scope, shrunken pupil, widened iris,
that driven quest up a mountain top to
God. I loved it! That will to keep looking,
to keep looking for.