On my eleventh birthday
Dad gave me this book -
The Eyes of the Killer Robot.
Inside the peach cover was
gothic baseball,
malevolent wizardry,
small breath horror, and
magic, cut with 1950s science.

In the book a madman
learns how to extract our eyes
and uses them to power
an evil golem ace.

This morning, twenty-seven years later,
in the pre-Christmas rain
that pools black in the brick
I suddenly wondered
if Dad with his incurable
glaucoma his eye drops
and surgeries, realized he'd given me
a book about the fears of stolen eyesight.

And the son came to know
what the father knew:
the terrible softness
of a trembling eye
under the blooming
steel of the speculum.