She said she saw vowels
underneath her birdfeeder
and that she wasn’t sure
whether they were blind or just
had no eyes at all, but how
did they see where they were
going? Northern European
depictions of Christ being mocked
on his way to the cross show him
seated and blindfolded, but in
the small painting on wood panel
found hanging above the hotplate
of a ninety-four year old woman
selling off the contents of her home
in northern France, Christ stands
at the center beneath a gold leaf
sky, his eyes unmasked
in the Byzantine style. It sold at auction
for twenty-four million euros after tests
under infrared light revealed it was
painted by Cimabue in the thirteenth
century, the missing volet gauche
or left wing of a polyptych
altarpiece: tunnels made by worms in
its wood matched up with holes
in the other panels, indicating that they
were all once part of the same plank
of poplar. Isn’t science amazing?
But even with a microscope
or telescope, has anyone ever
figured out why love is
blind or, for that matter, how
to see vowels? A 2016 study found that voles
are capable of empathy: they comfort
each other when mistreated, spend
more time grooming an injured
vole, and develop levels of stress hormones
similar to those of voles that have been
harmed. Yet physicists tell us that dark matter
isn’t matter, might not even
exist. It casts no shadow—like the a
in after, so there’s no use
searching for its presence, only
its consequence, as with love when it’s
over or the body deep in a grave,
which scientists now say continues
to move for over a year,
but where does it think
it’s going?
