on mental lenses

1. Lying on my right side in the grass when it is quite sunny. I think about how a man-made camera would duplicate the effect of each eye’s lens crossing the other so I see my arm, but I can see the grass through my arm tho it is behind it, actually. I blink each eye separately and the picture shifts from my arm to the flower garden five yards away. The sun is so goddamn warm and bright in my left eye and that is definitely something a movie lens would not get in the right way, in fact I think I’ve never seen a film with crossed-eye impressions of grass and sunburned arms and visions of eyelashes flirting with tiny bugs, tiny bugs crawling ten-story blades of grass in july. I like to smile about this because it is distracting.
2. In a hired black taxi skimming down the FDR drive past Queens and Brooklyn and the glowing Pepsi sign and the water is just as black, too. It’s night, so lights are on and the telescope in my eye can see dry fingers flicking on switches and either standing at the window like mirrors to me or ignoring the same old city night again. We don’t see stars except on deck chairs, and at the pier there is a real telescope. For two quarters you can spy-scan the other side, the other island that is practically a mainland poking into the ocean. The spy-scan is no better than the eye telescope tho because the scan is just that, it is a cursory view and difficult to focus and can’t see hands in pockets or coin jars.