Red Circles

I had photographs taken of the inside of my eyes on Joralemon Street, at Dr. McGroarty's office. They applied the medicine that dilates the eyes and sat me in a dim hallway the color of putty while the medicine did its work. The color of the wall in front of which they sat me was beige, brown, pinkish, greyish and my vision a complete blur that added a universe of subtle points of color to the quiet stew of color, lighter at the bottom, darker near the ceiling. I had been told to keep my eyes open, but not to read or look at any phone, so after a while I noticed a shiv of pink to the left of the wall, a slim delicate blurred angle of pink that came alive in a field of pulsating warm grey.

 During the exam there was an array of lights. An acid green light that pulsed to red, hot stripes of magenta against my eyelids interrupted by squares of fiery yello, red lights to stare at with one eye, white lights to stare at with one eye, a blinding flash as the camera threw light into the cavity of my eyes. Chalulim. Watch the needle, they'd said, to still my eye for the capture. Afterward, as I looked away a large rose tinted circle lay over all I saw.

 As the doctor explained my situation to me I was distracted by his tie, printed with pointalist designs reminiscent of the floaters that slip through my field of vision, and the thing in my eye, the threatening choroidal nevus, that has caused the worry. He showed me photos of the inside of my eyes, printouts of red hot orbs that look a lot like photos of the sun exhibiting solar activity. A good argument for sun worship. Inside out suns looking at suns, integrally integrated. One of my eyes seems to be erupting in some kind of flare that made a circle of hot yellow points circling a greyish crater, as if a meteorite had shot through the atmosphere and somehow landed inside my eye. I will be getting a second opinion from Dr. Shier, to see if the crater in the Northwest of my retina is a danger to my vision or my life, or a harmless internal abysm.

Watch the needle, still your eyes. I saw another needle on Fulton as the spike of the Fort Greene Column came into view, capped with an oracular basin like those on White's columns at Bartel Pritchard. The finial was straight up, straight ahead. I never realized how the concourse of Willoughby frames the monument to the dead lying in Brooklyn's original park so perfectly. But the framing did not help to remind me of 11,500 starved colonists silent beneath it. It was hard enough to look the horizon straight in the eye with my pupils so wide open.