Observant Eye: A Review of Stelios Mormoris’s THE OCULUS

The title of Stelios Mormoris’s The Oculus is based on his background in architecture and his fascination with the “round or oval opening, small rounded window, with or without a glass panel, which is generally located at the top of a dome.” His attention has long been drawn to examples of oculi in architecture, but he emphasizes that none of these has “more significance than the oculus of the eye.”

What the poet doesn’t mention is another definition of oculus, namely the botanical and zoological definition: “an eye, spec. the compound eye of an insect.” The idea of a “compound eye” is very much part of Mormoris’ vision.

The first poem, “Return of Icarus,” a persona prose poem, establishes the first lens of the oculus, the Icarus who didn’t just fail, but “set out” to fail, gifted “with wings of wax and feathers, every child’s sleeping and waking dream.”  Rooted to the world with his “arsenal,” his choice was clear.  He “flew straight into sky’s pandemonium,” listening to the sea below him and the sun above him. 

This Icarus is drawn to the oculus of the high dome, but he sees with the oculus of the compound eye.

Icarus returns out of love and finds “the color of murder,” his lapsed friends, his cat, his father sleeping, each a visual detail, the cat “purring in a stand of reeds,” the father “sleeping with his hands on his face.”

Yet, there is a voice from above that wants Icarus to return, the voice that “was heaven’s blame in cloud-shredded rays.” Icarus, the I, is “back in the aegis,” he is “sheltered from sun,” and his home is “an eye a marrow of light, my oculus.”

Having established his perspective, the poet offers three sections of work:  Sentries, Aureoles, and Verdicts. From a compound eye, Sentries explores facets of a love relationship, Aureoles views many places in the world, and Verdicts explores his relationship with and observations of his mother.

In Sentries, “Mimosa” begins with “You cut me,” immediately clarifying the depth of the relationship. The poet takes the reader through detailed images like “you were a bubble of air / rising in a water glass” and “you lifted my limp fingers / like unwatered stems,” to the point where the you,

took me by the hand into the garden
to stand before the greening lawn
as if it were a well
and said my name.

“The Fog” is past and present. “The fog becomes memory of fog…” and the “I” is “not exactly lost but in fear of being lost,” driving in the fog, holding “to the white neon dashes of the road.” There are images of descent, literal and figurative: “abysses everywhere that invited descent,” “shifted down for my safety,” and “lie down / at the nadir in a field of moss,” all of which rise to the final line, “I was in love.”

In the remaining poems of this section, many reference physical love, but all are detailed, imagistic, and linguistically original: “Poseidon’s spears spar,” “The insistent plea / that ‘love will end the madness’ / slithered inside me all day,” “the prized butterfly quivering // in a field of torn milkweed,” or the extended metaphor of trying to restore the “flung cup”,

white tips of light,
blue enamel lips of porcelain,
and the handle like a lost ear
falling forever.

In Aureoles, circles of light that surround something, especially as depicted in art around the head or body of a person represented as holy, the poet turns his eye on aureoles around the globe. He begins in Spain with “Corrida.” The poem snakes down the page as the poet recounts a bullfight interspersed with the observer’s comments, the “The false threat of the bull” that “looms like a cloud lowering,” the “silk’s scarlet red…catching my foreigner’s conscience / as a parody of blood and lapsed royalty,” the “dark maroon rivulets,” the cape slipping “to the ground like a dinner napkin.”

Whether in Paris, where tourists are “grazing on the excess grandeur of gargoyled boulevards,” or in San Francisco, where the poet remembers 1963 when he “straddled a pair of gleaming silver tracks,” waiting for a trolley, or in Oyster Bay, where the “tethered dinghy stirs, awakens, and makes a slow, circumspect circle like a clue,” each aureole has its own special time and place.  In Kaiki Beach, he reminds us that even as there are circles of light, there is also darkness.  The seafoam is like “torn lingerie,” and “a priest in a swath of black robe… gives his blessing to the unborn baby,” but this is followed immediately by “and, here, a coiled snake readies its strike in the tide’s aqua shallows.”

The third section, Verdicts, focuses on his mother.  In this strong section, images of details sing and bring the mother to life.  He begins with Barley, “barley crammed into thick honey laced with thyme.” Two thirds of the way through the poem,

she was dead
while we ate in the pew
together, children again,

and the reader, through the three word “she was dead,” is plunged with the poet into grief. 

In “At Midnight,” the “mother’s thin hands” pull the plug on the Christmas tree lights which “froze into a filigreed silhouette of needles.” The poet waits for hunger to pass, for snow “to fall in the glass globe’s lens,” and to “bury my father / toppled like a log beside his dogs.” The juxtaposition of basic hunger, the small detail of the globe, and the enormity of burying a father heighten the large and the small.

In “The Apron,” the poet puts on his mother’s apron, shocked to find it

…hanging
on a nail, slump-shouldered,
as if she had just slipped out

in a rush to die.

So many details offer the reader a different perspective. In “Lord & Taylor,” the poet looks down to see “

…the delta of veins,
crepe skin over knuckles linked
like vertebrae, your wedding band gone…

then concludes “I knew you were broke.”  This slant approach to the fact gives the fact potency.  

Later in the section, he gives us his mother’s earlier years, first in “Margarita,” when the poet watches his mother put her “face on to face the morning,” then in “Mass in Harlem,” where he goes “straight to mass in Harlem,” where his mother was born. In “The Consommé,” he reminds the reader that

There will always
be spices in the spice
rack I can smell,
that refuse to perish,

reminding the reader that as long as he remembers her, blessed by the words “agapi mou,” she will have a form of eternity.

The poet dedicates his work to Margaret Zitis Mormoris with a quote from Kahlil Gibran: “We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.”

Joys and sorrows intertwine in this collection and Mormoris illuminates them with his observant eye.