2 JANUARY 1993, Page 27

Mirage

A lash extracted clumsily...

For nights and days the eye smarts and weeps. Have I been in a fight a colleague joshes me.

Yes, I feel like answering, the fight, always lost, to see clearly.

Images mist beyond the window while I fear for my sight.

Normal vision is at length restored.

Expansive relief — even the sense that how I usually perceive is flawed wants to turn for its emblem to the kind of Florentine heat that conjures from dust in a scorched path a mirage of dew, which, as you bend towards it, hardens but prints an after-image, lingering like an aesthete's dream of fountains in stone gardens.

Michael O'Neill