pebbled glass

The focus changes though the lens has been broken for as long as memory runs. The stippled seeping of low wattage light, mimicking the beading of water, catching the gist, missing the vision. The drizzled sensation of an object, imagined half-way near to real. The odd pointillism that forgives all distinctions by erasing them entirely. Something witnessed in such a way that it will never be seen at all. Something placed in a frame because the idea owns the eye, a thing made into an image because sight has stolen all the seeing left.

We set our shoulders against the earth, intent on spending the rest of our short lives striving away. We submerge beneath a set of notions until we begin to breath only of that ocean, we immerse ourselves in an idea until we are living always out to sea. Believe and even this dense blindness becomes a blessing. Faith fills in all the spaces and bridges the fearsome gaps. Faith fills in all the things we miss because we will not see. The lessons of art are always cloistered in these crimes of omission. The lessons of life are always disguised by the lack of asking.

I see pictures, I see places, I see my distance and my reach. I see the water bead inside the shower door, all spatter and steam as the light in the bathroom is painted in pixel by pixel. The congruence of design and conceit, the intersection of craft and habit colliding in the dull litany behind my eyes. I pick and choose, following all the clues I hid by looking, limiting the details to a leaf here, a feather there. Permanent mistakes committed to again and again, the scenery bearing the weight of the word it wears, the picture always out of context, the story always out of frame. Pebbled glass blurring the motive and the means.