The Interchangeable World of the Micronauts

What half-blind is like:

like two microscopes in my head

each with differently stuck objectives.

They enable the small and the very small

and reduce everything else to blur and shade.

Yet you can train even this.

Train it to spot the shape of sharks’ teeth,

of which there are many samples and many shapes

but not as many as flecks of sand, pieces of shell.

I have hundreds plucked from the shore.

But in the same beach I buried a toy

and never found it again. A tiny toy:

articulate, a translucent man, a smallness

to whom the world was an unbounded wonder.

Blemished and damaged I would hold him up

and say He is broken and anyone who could see

would say He looks fine to me.

But they can see well, not finely.

Look at his face, etched and serrated

by that gargantuan saw.

The cracked shell of his translucent skin,

buried in rubble now, and those teeth,

all that remain of terrible and invisible jaws.