A cataract is like skin, but it is a waterfall

Waterfall like a sight over the eye but the eye is a lipped bowl
Look with me.
water erodes the soft karst under the iris and pours in.

The optometrist bends, flowers over his phoropter
toward the medical rectangle of sun.

His index finger slowly lefting.
The waterfall: water, rock, and act of falling.
A waterfall, a cataract.
A mist.

The eye is where everything falls in.

His finger lit by flashlight holds there, falls into the open hole.
Dive.
Resuscitate a mangled truck in finger’s wrinkles.
Fingerprints are just little nipples
that punctured the epidermis before birth.

Eyelid glows orange with light the eye cannot refuse.
Do not refuse the image.
The truck had folded into bands of white strata.
My grandparents metamorphosed,
blood watered on the emptied leathery seats.

Slam of passengers into whiplash, into the rip
of skin skidded on asphalt.
His finger
look
moves right.

Light, blood-dusted, bodies in outline. Radiant.

The old hand-down computer spins the image in its eye,
in the whipping circle disk drive iridescent and perched.
I eat that eye whole.
It slicks down.

Look. The doctor tells us about cataracts. One in my eye
diffused before birth, swam congenital, small and gray. See,
it isn’t harmful. I have always seen around the little ghost.

Megan Bromley (they/any) is a poet and astrobiologist concurrently working toward their MFA at Randolph College and their PhD in Geological Sciences at Arizona State. They also work as a poetry editor for Revolute, Randolph's student-led literary magazine. They have an old lady cat with speckles in her eyes, and another one the color of muenster cheese.