One Breath on Your Glasses, Then Watching

Quarter past six in the morning, I stand at a bread stall with my glasses just off my face. The early wind has carried dust from the main road, and both lenses wear a film like mist. I raise them to my mouth, breathe on them, and go to wipe them on my shirt hem, as I have done more times than I can count since the eighth grade.

This time my hand stopped halfway.

You keep wiping those, sir?

They fog up.

They are not fogged, they are clean.

The woman selling bread was right, because looking again, the spot I had just breathed on was already clearing from the edges inward. I stayed there and watched it to the end, probably a little longer than the people queuing behind me would have liked. The bread was hot, a warm smell of pâté rising from it, and I left the stall with the first line of a poem in my head.

Back home, I stood in front of the small mirror over the washbasin, breathed on it, and waited. The white patch spread, the taste of toothpaste still in my mouth, the tap dripping steadily as it had for who knows how long because nobody had turned it off tight. I stood for exactly three seconds. Not long, but enough to write the lines below.

The poem

One breath on the lens,
a white patch opens out
the size of a coin.
Then it draws in from the edge.

I stand and watch
as you would watch a job
that needs nothing from me.
It knows its own way back.

Three seconds. Sometimes two.
That bit of glass runs clear
and nobody wiped it.
All it took was me standing still.

How many other things
I rush to wipe clean
before I can see
they would have cleared on their own.

One more breath on the glass, just to watch.

Two paragraphs outside the poem

A poem does not explain. Prose does, so here are a few things the poem keeps quiet about.

What is easy to see in this scene is the hurry: I wipe because I am used to wiping. What lies underneath is a little different. My out-breath fogs the glass, and that is the breath's own business, and its clearing is its own business too. I do not need a cloth. I only need to let it travel the whole way. The spot where I rush to wipe things clean is the spot where I do not trust that some things end by themselves if left alone long enough. I would not claim that holds for everything, but it holds for a patch of breath on glass, and that is enough of a place to begin practising.

The second paragraph is humbler. I do not meditate by looking at my glasses, and I forget most days. The next day, at the coffee stall, I wiped them on my hem without a thought for the poem. Forgetting is fine. Some days I remember, some days I do not, and what is worth keeping is remembering once in a while, even once a week.

The first time, you may find it silly, and two or three seconds can feel very long. The way to know you did it right is that your hand really does not reach for the cloth. After a week, some people say they think of the fog when they are irritated; others get to the end of the week remembering nothing and let it go. Both are fine. On a busy day, breathe once and watch once. One easy way to slip is to breathe on the glass again and again to see it better, but breathing out many times in a row can make you dizzy. If you feel light-headed, stop and breathe normally. If you would like to read more about watching without steering, there is a piece on observing the breath and one on when the mind refuses to settle.