When taking a visual field test
to map the areas you cannot see,
you need to keep your gaze fixed
on the screen’s central point
so when lights flash on the periphery
your eye will not just anticipate
and follow the quick programmed glints
you click on like someone playing
a video game—“chasing the light”
in order to get a higher score,
instead of learning where
the blind spots in your vision are.
Half-blind in one eye
and riddled with dead-zones
in the other, you see now
that you have spent most of your life
searching each human encounter
for random flashes of romance,
never admitting the limits
of your vision—the need to keep your gaze
fixed on the person at the center,
to remain patient, waiting in the dark,
for the horizon to light up
as if suddenly before you.
Kevin O’Connor is an editor of One on a Side: An Evening with Seamus Heaney and Robert Frost, and his poems and reviews have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review Online, James Joyce Quarterly, and other publications. He is faculty emeritus at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.
