If only I had remembered it correctly. I wanted to write it down so that I would in fact remember it, but I would never see it again as on that afternoon. The edge of sleep, the one with unsanded edges alert to cliffs in miniature, soon subsiding into sounds and sought for dark, as if a language of a fist unclenched for the birds it might release in wingless furl. I wanted to get at what gets your attention, what comes across as you're reading. It has to be light, or a change of light, to set your attention askew. It is the shadows that pass across the window you are facing and then across the window at your back. Every time it happens you think that something strange is going to happen when in fact it already has -- the cursive of disorientation. I would say the shadows are like wingbeats, but I've heard that before. I feel the shadows press as if they were being thumbed into the doughy whites of my eyes and I am powerless to stop the stabs, too fast for blinking. They were themselves already blinks. I started to think of them as eyelashes even after I knew they were the triangular formation of shadows made by a flock of birds darting over the house and heading west toward the Art Museum and the river. I sense that the point is inside the eye itself and that the shadows flicking across the window that I face twitch like eyelashes too late for automatic squinting. And then the backlash behind me, another interior set, all diagonals and soundless, the sharp downward spear that comes in passing behind and back up my spine as if the birds themselves had passed through the room. I wonder what would happen if I could photograph the shadows. I'd probably see them interrupt and stop and not feel, nor sense what I do, which is that the shadows pass into and out of my room as if threading a needle, and that needle is my eye, and those shadows first pierce my window lashes, but I am all eye and they pass through me, and shoot behind my eyes, full blanks that they are, loaded with a quicker darkness than the eye can fathom, but shadow forth a blur, specimens of quicksilver, unbuckled latitudes of eye and all that is not sleepless goes there to taste that disequilibrium. A sense of self shifted out of itself, and thinking as all eye and so really sensing that what the senses sense is what passes through and out; but doesn't pass through, or only passes to the point of registering its impression on the threshold of the nerves. I suppose it doesn't matter but of course the eye is a theoretical sense and nothing has been touched, and yet everything is changed because of what has clipped across a pair of scissored shades. I recall and it returns to that line of "bird shadows stab a window" from so many years before. But now they've gotten through that window. And the window is not a window but an eye and I am neither here nor where shadows pass. I am through.