Blind Observation

While your fingertips graze the engravings

of your doctorate degree,

and while you tell me that I'm not seeing

what I really ought to see –

a list of values so precise

of little value to me –

my lens is set on 40x

and my vision takes careful steps –

retrograde, delicately –

balancing on microtubules,

the same ones you dryly dissect.

Dodging vesicles, then, I row,

through a huge ionic lake;

at each turn I make by lipid shores

I see something sweet metabolize

for critical – beautiful – energy.

Ripples of reticula approach

and lead me to the envelope

which contains the message

that you've never quite transcribed properly

but stained time and time again –

methylene blue, acridine orange –

but not even once with your wondercolor.