Nine short lines, one unfinished sentence, and a question that never appears inside the poem itself: that is the trick of Joel Oppenheimer's «Where Are My Glasses». The question lives in the title, the kind of thing a person mutters while patting a bedside table. Everything after it is the answer, delivered on a scale that makes the question look ridiculously small. Where are the glasses? Well, there were wild creatures, and pillars, and a whole colonnade.
The central idea is that passion is a kind of blindness, and that this is both grand and funny. The phrase "blinded / by passion" is a stock expression, but the title gives it a literal edge. Someone who has lost their glasses really can't see, so the old figure of speech becomes a plain fact. The poem lives in that overlap. It lets desire sound like a catastrophe, then reminds us that the practical result is a missing pair of spectacles.
The imagery is deliberately oversized. "Wild creatures" removes the people from the scene. There is no "I", no "we", no names, only beings who sound closer to animals than to anyone who wears glasses. The verb "tearing" is an animal's verb too, all force and no finesse. What they tear down is a colonnade, a row of columns that is architecture at its most dignified and ordered, the sort of thing a civilisation builds to look permanent. The image may also echo the blinded Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple, though the poem never says so. Either way, the mock-heroic scale is the joke. The poem doesn't say what was actually broken, and judging by the title, we are left to infer something much more domestic than a ruined temple.
The wording is quietly comic. In "the whole damned collonade" (spelled that way in the text as given), "whole" stretches the exaggeration, and "damned" lets a speaking voice slip in. It sounds half exasperated, half proud, like someone telling a story to a friend and enjoying it despite himself. The phrase "for a good deal of / the night" is understated in the same way. It is vague and slightly bookkeeping, where we might expect boasting. The poem is happy to be casual about an epic evening.
The construction does much of the work. There is no rhyme and no capital letter, and the only punctuation is a handful of commas, with no full stop at the end. The grammar is a fragment: "wild creatures... tearing down" has no main verb, so we get a snapshot instead of a story, a bit like the blurry glimpse of the night before that a person without glasses might have. The line breaks make the reading lurch. Lines end on "the", on "of", on "and", words that can't stand alone, so the eye is pushed down the page just as the sentence tumbles forward. Notice, too, that the commas mostly fall inside lines ("creatures, blinded", "passion, tearing"), so sense and line break keep pulling against each other. The one line that ends on a comma is "whole damned collonade,", and that is the one moment the poem pauses, as though the dust is settling after the pillars come down.
Then comes the ending. Lines that have been rushing suddenly shrink to "next morning" and a final, lonely "also". That one word is the punchline. It stretches the rampage past the night and into daylight, which is funny for its stamina and a little rueful for its tiredness. The missing full stop matters here as well. Without it, the sentence doesn't close, and neither, we sense, does the search for the glasses.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. In a few dozen words it manages mock-epic exaggeration, a pun that grows out of a title, and good comic timing, all in the relaxed rhythm of someone talking. It suggests that a big feeling and a small inconvenience can belong to the same moment, and that poetry can show both by changing nothing but the scale.