Stare. Educate the eye.
	 Die knowing something.
	 You are not here long.
		- Walker Evans

Once in a while the eye knows something:
a blood-sun flattened on the Sant Rosas,
thunderheads to the east washing San Jacinto

bruise purple-green – and the eye is content,
knowing its place in the desert – shallow
bowl set out for evening damp. For gifts.

But the eye is restless: it would be God.
It should know better, and still it scours
the landscape, rifles the mind’s cupboards –

Look: she’s walking up the road, for mail.
Will she glance up? smile? On she goes, head
down. They eye follows her red shift, bereft.

The eye would have each thing feed its hunger.
When it fails, it sulks. As tonight: the mountains
random slag heaps, the desert a chaparral waste;

bats flitter by the face – spastic tics in the dusk.
A sunset leached into coal. The eye insists –
and the world turns sullen, recalcitrant. Tell me

how stare might soften into gaze. I would 
die knowing something inward of the iris –
how to let it open without so much need.