The Eyes
by Tennessee Williams

The eyes are last to go out.
They remain long after the face has disappeared regretfully
into the tissue that it is made of.
The tongue says good-by when the eyes have a lingering silence,
for they are the searchers last to abandon the search,
the ones that remain where the drowned have been washed ashore,
after the lanterns staying, not saying good-by. . .

The eyes have no faith in that too accessible language.
For them no occasion is simple enough for a word to justify it.
Existence in time, not only their own but ancestral,
encloses all moments in four walls of mirrors.

Closed, they are waiting. Open, they're also waiting.
They are acquainted,
but they have forgotten the name of their acquaintance.

Youth is their uneasy bird, and shadows clearer than light
pass through them at times,
for waters are not more changeable under skies
nor stones under rapids.

The eyes may be steady with that Athenian look
that answers terror with stillness, or they may be quick
with a purely infatuate being.  Almost always
the eyes hold onto an image
of someone recently departed or gone a long time ago
or only expected . . .

The eyes are not lucky.
They seem to be hopelessly inclined to linger.

They make additions that come to no final sum.
It is really hard to say if their dark is worse than their light,
their discoveries better or worse than not knowing.

but they are last to go out,
and their going out is always when they are lifted.