The Geometry of Light
David Lee
Part I: The Geometry of Light
The lamp remembers the cataract’s map:
a bruised moon veiled in milk.
I ask a child to name the color of morning;
she laughs, says sky tastes like glass,
and lifts her thumb, bright as a seed of dawn.
In clinic corridors the fluorescents sigh,
handing me receipts for my small kindnesses:
a chart, a murmur, a stitch in the ledger.
I read each iris like a weather map:
radial storms, thin spokes of surrender,
the patient’s life folded in a pupil’s calm.
Outside, prairie grass hums a burnt hymn.
A boy chases a dog whose tail is truth.
At home my son presses a paper tulip to his ear
and swears it whispers hello.
I show him how to cup a sunbeam
between two steady hands,
teach him the first word of seeing: look.
When twilight fogs the lens again,
and the eye becomes a room with no exit,
I listen to the geography of trust.
Later, rubbing anesthesia from my own sight,
I find the world still arguing:
light on one side, mercy on the other.
Part II: Wind That Remembers Names
Wind comes over the buttes like a blunt answer,
a hand sweeping feathers from the table.
Grandmother’s feet still kept the drum’s center
when her bones were a ledger of fractures.
She said perception is a church repaired by prayer.
The reservation map in the paper trembles:
roads are veins, rivers are the breaths we held.
We buried a name in winter; it keeps echoing:
a bird beating its wings against our stories.
I speak to patients with the same small language
I use for machines: brief, true, and kind.
But the plains teach another grammar:
how to name absence without flattening it,
how to set a bowl for someone who will not come.
At dusk, an old dog pads along the fence,
counts lamplight like rosary beads,
and I, half in my lab coat, half a son,
watch the horizon hold its breath and open again.
Part III: Origami Instructions for the Soul
My mother’s lists unfold like paper wings:
soy sauce, gauze, rent, small mercies.
She escaped one horizon and taught me
to read the other by candlelight.
Between clinic and kitchen, I keep two tongues:
the measured names of instruments,
the softer words for a child’s scraped knee.
I have stitched retinas and broken sentences
in the same long night.
When a patient says I can’t see,
I hear my father naming rain
on the old short-wave radio.
Perception, he said, is practice.
So we practice at the sink:
washing rice, rinsing worry,
and in the exam room,
widening the aperture of grace.
Once, a girl offered me a paper crane.
I took it like a diagnosis: delicate,
folded from hope. Now it watches
from my desk beside prescription slips
and a Polaroid of a boy tying his shoes.
Sometimes I write the future
on the outside of an envelope,
then let the river read it.
Water edits what I meant to say
into clean lines. The final instruction
is always the same:
Be clear-eyed, and kind.
David Lee
David A. Lee is physician and an emerging poet based in Houston, Texas, whose work explores memory, human connection, and the liminal spaces between perception and reality. He holds a background in medical science and philosophy, bringing a reflective and inquisitive lens to his writing. His poetry draws inspiration from both contemporary and classical literature, emphasizing vivid imagery and emotional depth. His poems are forthcoming in Mobius, Euonia Review, and Unbroken Journal. David is currently developing a collection of original poems examining time, identity, and place.