Carlos Reyes
	Seeing                       When I look in the mirror          all I see is time                      ––Mario Benedetti   She said I always go for guys with blue eyes.   I never noticed that my eyes were blue   never saw any color in them, saw like Benedetti only time.   Now I see blue, walk out into the world, my vision clean.   No more clogged tear ducts. Me. The world. All there is.   Rubbing the sleep away   I open block-light drapes face the atomic sun,   the blue, an azure sky not found in nature,   a blackness that turned grey, turned from grey to light.   I ask where I’ve been and do not answer yet.   Yet. I am not ready for someone else’s vision of my life   Though I see clearly through window panes.   I dissemble then answer them at last   My life, I made it up. I made it up so real   I can’t unmake it, nor do I care to...   You can take me, or leave me my flamboyant auto-   graph bigger than my ego, bigger than the moon.     Hearing   He can’t hear the crystal tinkle of finger cymbals, imagines no belly dancing.   Seldom can he hear the birds that wake the day but the alarm clock is loud   enough, the jets across the zenith of the sky, the cars in the street,   dogs barking, cats he hears, and the wind singing a song perhaps. . .   The refrigerator’s motor in the kitchen clear, the ringing swirl of tinnitus, too.   He hears your voice as well, if you call him sweetly longingly. . .   say you love him   and. . .  say it twice. Autobiography   The small tan spot on my upper right arm   I was almost sure was from a spider bite.   I could imagine skin dis- coloring, a stain spread   from a black widow bite in Panamá,   maybe an agitated spider in my own bedroom.   By now the spot is large, a dream island   in the Caribbean, but alas the doctor insists   it is no more than an age spot albeit a rather large one.   Another doctor insists that a piece of metal   embedded in my knee  is a projectile,   though I was never shot that I know of.   Are you sure? he asks. In fact, “the bullet” is   the most abiding mystery of my autobiography   and the favorite myth about me, a plant   I tend with care in the garden   of an ordinary life.