“Eye surgery with a backhoe”

I ran across that line in a poem today and I just loved it. Maybe it’s my mood. Here’s the whole thing, profound and puckish and pulsing with life:

Against Which

habit smacks
its dull skull
like a stuck bull
in a brick stall

and my version
of what I know
is like eye surgery
with a backhoe

on grace
so much beyond
my pitiful gray
sponge of a brain

I’d not believe it exists
except for such
doses of felicity
as this.

–Michael Ryan

from Poetry, November 2007

I typed this in because Poetry wasn’t posting poems online, but now it is. Here’s Against Which on their site.