by Laurie Clements Lambeth

                    Those black letters graying down the chart                
                                  to nothing,
           you thought then the doctor called it “Conscious
Sensitivity,” wrote it down, then replaced
               “Conscious” with “Contrast”
                            when you knew better: the Pelli-Robson chart.
Remember confronting the blankness, white letters on white,
               the pregnant intern saying, “Try harder”
                                                                    until the eye’s perimeter flamed?
                 A few meek letters rose from the laminated surface
because you conjured them.

                                                     *

                                       The brain slept
        through the Evoked Potentials exam and nothing matched up, no results.
                    The intern urged you to concentrate, blink. Hold still.
                                            You heard her say too little amplitude
                          and too much delay. Electrodes
glued to scalp read only sleep waves. Open, the eye blanked and dried.
                           Like watching a dead channel
                                  but harder work.
She suggested you perform equations in your head
                                       staring at the screen’s undulating checkerboard
folding into arbitrary vortices.

                                                     *

    Now you hear the old waltz of claws brushing floor tiles.
                Only peripheral flicker,
                                                 but still you turn, absorbed,
                   search for the living body slipped between
                      the seen and the conjured.
                                                                 In this state,
                                        eyes glazed, open to early grief,
                   in this threshold of light,
      there is much you could bring forth and rename:
                                                                                  conscious sensitivity. There.
                       It requires little toil: even that wisp
of dog hair rolling across the carpet is effortlessly imbued with shape.