Fix

Who knows where your eye
     will fix next?
Caged rolling animal
in the eye -- its vision
knuckled like a fist
     Who can say
what it sees?

     Signature of the body
its nodules
all starred -- like constellations,
like          Picasso's rendering of Balzac's
Unknown Masterpiece.
     A bestial net -- lines and just
that ugly woman knitting
near him.

Just me: shorn of hair, skeletal
with a grief I can't name -- my heart's
layer of cellophane
its glossy rip and pull --

the nasty fix in your eye, Byzantine
on me, your body's poor soul:
tethered like meat
to beast

to that foul naked
minotaur, abrupt
and beating.
 

Copyright 1999,  Amy Pence
 

Amy Pence teaches at DeVry Institute of Technology in Atlanta.  She's published in The Antioch Review, New American Writing, and other periodicals.  She has a three-year-old daughter named Ada.