Pareidolia (A Poem)

Unbidden, everything becomes a face.
No thing is safe. The unrelenting brain
Chisels features into each proffered plane
Without judgment, without regard for place,
And countersigns its trinitarian stare:
Gloats to have mastered the insensate block,
Feigns awed surprise to find hewn likenesses,
Chills to confront, in oddness, what it is.
But reason will not countenance the shock;
To have eyes is to find them everywhere.
So uninflected surfaces will serve
To order aspects out that otherwise
Would populate the orbit of our eyes.
If now and then one looms, leers, in the curves,
At least it is an image we can bear.
How much intent do we daily disown,
Only to stack horizons out of masks,
Turning visages to vistas at last?
The world becomes the watching, but if one
Would know it, one must face what lingers there.