Today's PAD Challenge prompt: "For today’s prompt, write a view poem. Wherever you’re at, you have a view: maybe of a river or sunset. Maybe of a cubicle or a copy machine. Even the blind have a view of darkness, nothingness, or some other -ness. And that’s just being literal, because everyone has views on sports, politics, poetry, etc."
I mixed the prompts into an interior scene that always (although in real life not so forebodingly as here) freaked me out a little. (I already did a witch poem on Day 10!) I only learned the proper name for it, phosphenes, by Googling in order to title the poem. The weirdest thing was to see artistic representations of the phenomenon.
Phosphenes
Back when the days were infinite
I’d spend long minutes pressing on my eyes,
fingers feeling the odd wrinkled lids,
eyeballs round and slippery beneath.
If you can gaze at nothing, I would gaze
at the scene that moved before me
against its black velvet dropcloth:
whirling checkers, sparkles, pulsing rings
of faintly colored light, black holes,
how one by one they rose, pulsed, burst.
I thought if only I watched closely
I could see what they really were.
How mysterious and insistent it was,
the nearness and infinity of the view!
Was it only I who saw this, else why
did no one ever speak of it?
Was I watching my own blood, I wondered,
my cells, my neurons fire? Was it a discharge
of all I’d ever seen, now wiping clear?
Was it a miniature universe deep inside--
the way trees grow down into your lungs--
its first formation, its constellations,
its joyous fireworks, an omen of its fearsome
final dissolution in a rain of fire?
--Draft by Anne Myles. Please do not copy/quote/cite without permission.
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