The Fitter​

​

It can take days. The vision, you see, is vital,

without it, it's nothing - a soft toy. Pass me

my eyes, pointing to an old biscuit tin.

 

It's a kind of hunting all over again, with books

open, photos pinned, ready with needle

and glue. They caught the body years ago,

that was the easy part. But he speaks now

 

of a soul; what, for instance, did the creature see?

Moorland, scrub, veld, or sodden jungle,

desert, wood, the same indigo skies?

The man who fits the eyes has never left

 

his semi in Cardiff, but he's a master of precision,

nothing's too small, or extinct. Recently

though, a slip in concentration perhaps -

an upright grizzly in the Natural History

 

has the eyes of a man stranded in his front room,

the telly blizzarding, the fire gone dead;

a bison's head looms out of a wall, dazed,

like a woman just woken, sleep crusting her eyes;

 

and a pair of monkeys stare out from a London window,

like lovers come to the end, at a loss

in front of what has been, what is to come,

deaf to the whirr and gong of the clock on the hour.

 

His eyes brim at night from all the detail.

There's a tea-towel over the mirror and it takes him a while

to sleep. Everything's always awake, he says.