The most surprising voice in "Eye to Eye" belongs not to the speaker but to the hero he invented as a boy. Halfway through the first stanza the poem lets this imaginary figure answer back: "Hey, it's hot up here! / I'm tired of coming to the rescue of girls / you're too scared to say one word to." The grumble is funny, but it is also a sharp piece of self-judgment. The adult speaker remembers a childhood spent "usually elsewhere, a thin presence to myself," reciting "a script of my own devising," and he now sees that the script handed all the courage to someone else. The boy's logic is even self-defeating: he calls himself a pacifist, yet expects his stand-in "to avenge all wrongs / with my infallible fists." The word "infallible" does quiet work here, because only an invented self can never fail.
The line breaks add to the effect. The first sentence pauses on "I am" for a beat before sliding into "usually elsewhere," so that presence and absence sit side by side. Later, "how my opposite number the hero" runs on without punctuation, as a child's thought would, never stopping to ask what the hero might feel until the adult finally does.
The middle stanza is only three lines long, and its brevity is part of its point. "Of unscripted moments, I remember few" — and the one it does offer is a failure: "I wreck every kite I ever try to fly / in the mountaintop's sideways wind." A kite is a good emblem for a scripted child. It is meant to rise on a string held from below, but the wind arrives "sideways," from a direction no plan allowed for.
The last stanza jumps to "late summer of my 40th year" and to sound. The katydids are "falling out of & back into unison / like a concert audience that continues its rhythmic / clapping during a break in the music." This simile suits insects well, since a crowd's clapping drifts and snaps back together in just that way. Their "camouflaged / leaf-bodies" may also echo the boy who was always elsewhere, hidden in plain sight. The speaker no longer writes the script. He floats on the "throbbing," and he admits that "sleep is the only time / I get to dream now," a small lament that adult life has crowded out the imagination that once built heroes. Where the hero was "up here," the speaker now treads "the high wires of the cicadas' whine," so that sound becomes a tightrope he must cross himself.
The title pays off in the strangest image of the poem: pressing "a cold watermelon to my belly – / one sightless eyeball to another." The navel and the melon become two blind eyes meeting. Judging by the imagery, this is the first real "eye to eye" in the poem, and it happens with something that cannot be a hero, an opposite number, or a rescuer. It is grotesque and tender at once, and it is wonderfully physical after all that talk of scripts.
The ending moves forward in time: "Soon enough, all distance will dissolve / into a single arc of spent sugar. / The half-moon will rise a lurid red." The distances that mattered earlier, between boy and hero and between self and world, seem to collapse. "Spent sugar" suggests summer's sweetness being used up, and perhaps something more final. The red half-moon looks very much like a cut slice of melon, so the sky repeats the fruit in the speaker's hands. The prediction is ominous, yet "lurid" relishes its color.
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no steady meter. Long, conversational sentences spill across line endings, and the ampersands give the page a jotted, informal look. The hush of "single arc of spent sugar" contrasts with the hard edge of "lurid red." The poem's significance lies in its honesty and its refusal of easy conclusions. It treats childhood imagination as both a gift and an evasion, mocks the speaker gently, and ends not on a lesson but in the senses: a cold rind, a loud night, a strange red moon.