Depth Of Field

By Peter Halstead

Weaving in and out, the eye
Darts around the corners of the sky,
Through copies of the sheepish trees
To refracted colors on the breeze,
Focusing at first on one,
Then bouncing off the mirrored sun,
Adding xeroxed leaf to leaf
To put the forest in relief,
Or subtracting shade from shade
To emphasize a glaring glade:
The productive eye’s indecent stare
Reproducing everywhere,
Its redundant double sight
Reducing us to copyright,

The eye that window shops en masse,
Seeing in a piece of glass
A cineplex of frozen stunts,
A quilt connected all at once,
Jumbling up a city girl
Caught beneath a sky of pearl
With her Fiorucci mirror showing
The vapor of a sky-blue Boeing
Like the necklace on a section
Of a passerby’s reflection
As inexorably as her eye
Sees me looking on the sly—
Our universe reversed by me
Almost inadvertently,
Where the sum of all divided lites
Yields a storefront’s thousand sights,
The street projected on a shelf
As full of pictures as the light itself.