Lidless

1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Ode on the Departing Year,” Epode II, in Poems, Bristol: J. Cottle & Messrs. Robinsons, 2nd edition, p. 15, […] yet, as she lies By livid fount, or roar of blazing stream, If ever to her lidless dragon eyes, O Albion! thy predestin’d ruins rise, The Fiend-hag on her perilous couch doth leap, Mutt’ring distemper’d triumph in her charmed sleep.

Two or three minutes later the murdered man, the blanketed corpse, the lidless coffin, and the open grave were under no inspection but the moon’s.

You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked—those pale, chinless faces and great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes!—as they stared in their blindness and bewilderment.

When I exercised the pony, old Johnny, after school hours I loved to ride through the Cook Street chaos of garbage. High and safe on the horse’s back I could look down into it and see wild rose bushes forcing their blooms up through lidless cook stoves and skunk cabbage peeping out of bottomless perambulators, beds tipped at any angle, their years of restfulness all finished and done with.

One foot caught on a ridge in the blacktop driveway and I stumbled. The cup of café mocha flew out of my grasp and settled lidless on the pavement.