W203 Response #10

                This second safari through the Animal Soul has me thinking ‘Finally I Buy X-ray Glasses,’ which will hopefully add to the understanding of the “moment’s text,” for: time passes subtly through this poem and the length (for Hicok) is a dance with brevity. The start seems reasonable enough given the title; with a thirteen year old peering into the potential of a “supercharged glance.” And hints at (maybe) a Catholic^? (or some other guilt based faith organization’s) upbringing, for the speaker’s sight ends with the “scowling mask of God” who apparently finds it necessary to vengefully chastise the youth for fancy. The delivery is right on, with “this” pause at the end of the first line, as if even then “seeing through” into at least language, the realm of imagination, where (nearly) anything is possible and one need not actually wear glasses from “the Johnson Smith Company” to “pierce to atoms” or to “pierce to [the thought] of atoms.” Truly, if one were to be wearing the “x-ray specs” would one need to question “when it would stop”?

                But whom, or more rightly, who’s when “was a literalist?” The early romp has the speaker “invad[ing] walls and blouses and” such, suggesting a more outward focus. But the thirteen year old speaker may have been the one (already) seeking “secrets[‘] sol[utions]… inside” with the world outside as a mirror, imagining what it would be like to see through the mirror, into the medicine cabinet (&beyond^?). It’s hard to say, for the next sentence frames what feels like a significant time period passage (if not geologically, in the course of the human experience, and most definitely in the course of the Drosophila experience) and the ‘Finally’ of the title suggests so, and the transition between tenses nearly paints it in safety orange with “that was before” but there’s no real indication as to how far distant the poem’s now is from “13.” It may not matter tho, maybe x-ray glasses are like Stephen King’s Wizard Glass from The Dark Tower series that fuzzifies some pieces of the puzzle while (sometimes unpleasantly) magnifying others.

                The conclusion begs the question: if the literalist “was before” is the speaker then (now^?) treading the sometimes dusty (sometimes muddy) road of figurative language; with the box and the specs and the mystery’s description of “Zeus-power… check[s]” and balances? Whether they nucleated the “laugh [that] became kisses” or not, it seems that Bob did ‘Finally… buy [some] X-ray Glasses’, ‘cause they’re on the cover of the book.