Fire Shut Up in My Bones

The eyes are the window to the soul is a timeworn cliché, but for Blow it holds true. His descriptions of the people in his life usually involve a poignant and poetic evaluation of their eyes. His grandfather Jeb’s eyes are “deep enough to get lost in, bottomless like Martin’s Pond; damp like the beginning of a good cry or the end of a good laugh” (12). Greta has “light brown eyes that sparkled even in the darkness” (194). His mother Billie is “plain-faced with honest eyes—no black grease by the lash line, no blue powder on the lids, eyebrows not plucked up high and thin” (7). Billie’s unadorned eyes suggest honesty and a lack of pretension. For Blow, the eyes reflect character, good or bad, and they can just as easily hide a person’s true nature as reveal it, as in the case of the boy with “kind eyes” who kills his parents. While he sometimes fixates on other parts of the face—Chester’s “impish smile, full of subtlety and mischief” (64) or Greta’s hair, “the kind that works against a brush” (194)—it is the eyes that most often pull his focus and provide insight to the person behind them.