Drawings from the Eye (a poem in prose)

His name is Ben. It says so on his backpack, in red embroidery.

He looks up, turning his head so abruptly that the strands of his hair shake in unison, brushing noisily against his ears. The tension in his face takes over and halts his body so he can focus on looking, all his energy diverted to observation.

The sun and a bird sing in the oak’s branches. The dappled pattern of light and leaves falls upon his arms and face to mask real imperfections with superimposed ones. He snaps away his gaze, severing the taut string of connection, and the bird and the sun are abandoned to flail in nothingness above him.

Ben’s jaw slackens as he replaces vigor with a light smile. He resumes walking up the hill, and picks up a tune. He whistles.

The intensity of his stride compliments the levity of his expression, just as the clean whiteness of his t-shirt matches the ruggedness of his dusty hiking boots, and his elegant height the cropped dry grasses.

He substitutes whistling with singing, “Tell me, Gracie,” then humming.
When he comes to the next bit of shade, under the next oak tree in the hot field of fragrant dryness, he pauses, panting. He turns around to face the path he has covered, then compares it to the distance stretched out before him, up the arid hillside.

He lifts a hand to his face, slowly enough to enjoy every movement of his slender arm’s muscle. When his fingers brush across his jaw, his eyelids traverse their orbs as anguish crosses his expression. A yet invisible bruise there still gives him pain. So he abandons it to brush through his hair with his fingers and take pleasure in its calming smoothness.

Looking up at the hill again, with his hand resting at the base of his neck and the angle of his elbow high in the air, he clears his face. He irons memories, trivialities out. His face becomes the same consistency of tormented beauty as the nature around him.

Until he suddenly dons perplexity. He frowns at the distant sight of a woman who has just surfaced over the horizon created by the hill.
The strange woman, apparently oblivious to her neighbor, does not hesitate before climbing up into the tree at the hill’s summit. Ben moves to correct the woman’s escape from his field of vision, eager eyes preceding his feet on the path up the hill.

After a few minutes’ approach, during which his face is increasingly wrinkled by curiosity and the heat, Ben arrives under the towering oak. He peers up, searching for a moment before finding the woman lying on a thick branch about midway up the tree’s height. The woman is curled around the branch, facedown, with closed eyes.
Ben calls out a soft “Hello?” but there is no reaction of any kind. The woman still has a thumb tucked in about the middle of a book that she is using as a pillow. The other four fingers cover the title written on the book binding, so all Ben can make out is that the author is Hardy.

He watches the woman in the tree. The woman’s story has to be interesting. She looks clean and middle-aged, motherly. And has walked up a significant distance (Ben looks and can’t see any nearby farms or cars) to lie in this particular tree and read until falling asleep with a peaceful smile. Ben wonders if this smile is the habit of a good-natured woman or if it is reserved for this tree.
Looking at the easy smile makes Ben realize the severity of his own frown, and that awareness makes his frown deepen.

He turns, frustrated, and starts down the hill. Not the way he has come, nor the way the woman came from, but perpendicular. The source of his frustration out of sight, he eases up, swinging his arms with thoughts of lighter things.
The ground in this direction soon becomes quite flat, and a few minutes’ idle walking leads Ben to a narrow creek, beneath a group of orange-barked trees.
He sighs and rests his forehead on one tree’s trunk to rest, closing his eyes. He opens them again on an inhale, and takes a judging look at the nearly still water. He holds onto the tree for help easing down to his knees and then crawls to the edge of the gentle creek. He peels off the backpack, setting it to the side, and exposing a sweat-darkened back to the cooling shade. From the side pouch of the bag he pulls out a water bottle and shakes it, to measure its emptiness.
About to dip the opened bottle into the smooth surface, he pauses. Instead of into the water, he pushes the bottle into the dirt at his side, resting his weight on it as he leans further over the stream.

He stares at the water’s surface for several minutes, fascinated by something underneath. At one point he reaches up to brush a lock of hair away from a cheekbone, an elegant dance of fingers and face. Meanwhile he never stops gazing into that shallow water.

Then he suddenly breaks the surface, scooping in to capture water that is subsequently splashed onto his face and rubbed in. He dips the bottle in his right hand into the creek and wipes his wet left hand on his denim-clad thigh. He glances once more at the water, now trembling from his intrusion, and then stands up, knees creaking.

He performs a quick leap across the creek and then a 360-degree turn as he seeks a destination. A quarter of the way into a second circle Ben pauses, peering into the line of glorious-scented trees trailing northward from his resting spot. His eyes narrow at the idea of something hidden within that grove, but his attention is distracted by a flash of red on a bird flying in the other direction.

Having discovered a sufficient motive, Ben marches towards the few black specks of black and red in the patch of taller grasses, intending to lie down and bask in the calls and color-flashes of his favorite bird.

But when he drops his backpack at the border of the taller grasses, he straightens, sternly gazing at the convulsing sobs of the birds. His face rains upon the ground beneath him as he slowly folds into thirds, in a child-like pose, and his arms shake from the intensity of his fists.

Ben silently heaves in anguish while the birds give voice to his sorrow and his tears imprint the dirt with his sincerity.

He sobs for minutes, continually, evenly. It is never going to stop, and the pain radiates from his form to taint everything around him with dark.

I feel his emotion and his need for comforting human contact, read it in the lines of his shaking form, his aching breaths that express a loneliness too vast and deep to be mapped by words. I approach.

“I just want you to know,” I began gently, to allow my words to sink in, not startle, “I think you are perfect.”

Ben subdues his sobs, listening and slowly sitting up and turning his head. His eyes of glass are finally upon me, and I look through them to the beautiful depths of his pain, which re-inspires my sympathizing tongue.

“I feel you, Ben. I…want to reassure you, to fill you with my understanding. I see how the beauty of…everything hurts you. I know the pain of uncontainable beauty, and I know you, that you, feel this too.”

He stands slowly, eyes fixed on me. The path of his remaining tears shifts when he opens his mouth, but he does not speak.

“I just want you to know, to really know, that you are beautiful, and perfect.”
I close my eyes briefly in the intensity of my expression. When I open them again, I see the reflection of my own face in the surface of his eyes.

I lift a hand towards him. But his forehead transforms into a maze of furrows in the moment before he reaches down for his bag and runs away from me into the tall grass. He moves briskly backwards for a couple of seconds, frowning at me, before turning away from me in flight. My hand still, extended, I watch him fade into the grasses.