La Tache Aveugle

Lyrics

The wallpaper continues behind your head.
A perfect, seamless pattern.
I’ve never seen the join.

A priest told a king, back in sixteen-sixty.
Edme Mariotte, with a piece of paper.
He said, close your left eye, sir.
Stare at the cross.
And watch the other ink spot… flee.
The brain, a polite and silent forger,
paints the parchment back again.
It doesn’t leave a note, it doesn’t ask for praise.
Just fills the hole where the world went away.

La tache aveugle.
The blind spot.
But the canvas never looks empty.
The visual cortex is a master, you see.
It paints the flower over the void.
It continues the line of the floorboard.
A beautiful, necessary fiction…
this quiet, perfect lie of mine.

Then a grid from Doctor Amsler.
Nineteen forty-five.
Crisp black lines on white paper.
He said, hold it still, right here.
And tell me what you see.
A warp in the windowpane.
A smudge in the geometry.
The hole reveals itself.
The painter is caught red-handed, for a moment.

La tache aveugle.
The blind spot.
But the canvas never looks empty.
The visual cortex is a master, you see.
It paints the flower over the void.
It continues the line of the floorboard.
A beautiful, necessary fiction…
this quiet, perfect lie of mine.

And I wonder what else it paints over for me.
The flicker of doubt when you looked away last Tuesday.
The exact sound of the key I lost in the rain.
The first word of the argument, the reason for the pain.
My little cortex, my ghost writer, working so hard in the dark…
filling in the cracks in my memory, so I don’t fall apart.
It just continues the pattern.
It insists on the whole.

The wallpaper behind your head.
Seamless.
Perfect.
I know the optic nerve leaves a hole.
But all I see is you.
Whole.