"His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely

between two poles, such as the body and the spirit,

the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands"

Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse.

I.

When I heard a woman behind me at the party say,

Nothing but new mirrors in my house," -

Meaning, she told another someone, no never-washed-off

Goliaths or gowks or gods in my house -I left.

I rushed home, avoiding all reflective surfaces,

And stood in front of one of my own mirrors.

There I was,

Looking as I do these days, but rushed.

In my house, the mirrors are old mirrors, mobbed.

How do the grundies and spooks, not to bump

A burglar, a paper-hanger, a feverish child,

Man tying necktie, bed-makers, bed-wrecking lovers,

Manage it to be here, all now in this room?

No presences.

Had I not watched my wife undress for this mirror,

And for me seeing her see me, last night,

Her summer legs and shoulders, white breasts,

Green of the carpet, gold frame in the sidelights?

Of all if her, nothing.

I pressed my palms against mirror's face,

And for a minute it kept my ten-fingered moisture,

Long enough for me to mark my other face there,

Circle the eyes, cut the throat.

It dried clear.

The room behind me was empty to the wall.

II.

Turned backside in storage,

For some reason face down on the floor,

Or draped in black for that child,

It must have been blind sometimes,

But it sees me staring now, so hard

I could see all, or it crack.

It does not crack. It looks at me.

They say a murderer shatters it

With first bullet, that no witness

Sees the second.. So does the suicide.

Girls have rehearsed love to it,

And asked it after love what shows.

Children have goggled their eyes,

Thumb-stretched mouths at it.

Someone stealthy has crossed it,

wishing its wideness would forget.

Young women have arranged their hair,

Not once meeting their own eyes,

And old women rouged softed cheeks,

Then wept, spoiling the silly color.

It does not crack. It shows nothing .

III.

I thought of going outdoors to stare at everybody's sky, gray-blue-airy

And unframed space, across it clouds in shapes anyone makes beliefs about,

Moving there. A great brow and down-drawn mouth rest on a dented pillow,

The face softens into pillow, into a shadowed mountain, two mountains,

Then islands on some old wild map. The shape of Nantucket, in summer

In nineteen forty-five. When the boat-whistle sounded near supper-time,

We knew, even across the moors, and would think, "Now we are an island."

There was not much then on grocery-store shelves. I bicycled a sandy mile

To post my evening letters - I was writing a book with a California man -

But more important, to get a bottle of whiskey, and was an expert at coasting

It safely home, Johnny was nine then, and his mother still herself,

But I was single-minded about the drinking, my prose was brave with it.

Sometimes she and I walked late near the starlit surf. She is dead.

IV.

Surf, and the soft island air, Moonlight.

Mirror with stars.

I am not here.

I was not here.

I have been standing here

All this time, not outdoors.

Not staring up at the clouds.

Here. But the mirror was of

Nantucket, that summer.

I am the mirror,

I, because I tell

The island cloud.

V.

If a mirror gathered and could not forget,

It would dim, darken, and die exhausted.

Old mirrors would be flats of dead black.

The woman I remembered was right, then -

There are no old mirrors in her house.

All the mirrors in all houses are new.

I see the mirror, and sight ends on it.

Nonsensical Alice climbs Dodgson's nose

And falls into the wonderland of his eyes.

Narcissus, that other foolish tumbler,

Falls upside down into the tricky water,

Barefoot brains and no glass of his own.

Space behind things outlines itself,

Admirable betweenness of the empty air

Wherein I will not be touched as I move,

In abundance in the most ordinary room

Of marvelous flowers near the glass,

A wealth of twice as many as I bring .

Alphabet, though, turns ominously back,

As cut in wood, it must reverse, to print:

I'll warn her of this death of the word.

And I've seen a room gaze eleven years,

Faithfully a glass give back the look,

Then go disloyal in a room next door.

My own right hand is mirror's left.

It parts my hair as others never see it,

And my eyebrow trim is scissors' luck.

Mirror remembers nothing, but he sees

With one wide eye in the back of his head.

So my fearful friend chose the wrong fear.

VI.

Some other time I'll tell her

How a painter, smudged and bemused,

Still with a left hand full of long wet bright-tipped brushes held away,

Picks up a mirror with his right, steps back from his picture, and turns,

To surprise it as its opposite.)

What stranger did this picture?

But these are his famous colors,

This is his kind of meaning and response, but as if painted on clear glass,

And he had gone around behind, and deep from the perspective looked out.

Should he have planned it so at first?

Have I put on (he thinks now)

Not knowing it, anything

New in my style, mine but beyond myself for once: No, this is as I paint.

Of course, the unimportance at midpoint, and one-eighth to left or right -

It was right, it's left here -

Is the inescapable opening

The eye must pitch into,

Having climbed from black-blues past the greens, first turned aside

By an overhang of white, flickering, led then and made eager, then to

Whatever I bring it to, -

In this design a wave

From under, about to break.

It is where the Child is held up; where the canal turns out of sight;

At a ghastly rider on a thin-legged horse; the cleft of a girl's breasts;

What the eye comes back to.

And my wave in its wil-falling

Breaks either from left or right

In a green drown, tons of a shatter of dissolving glass. It falls

He says aloud) lays the mirror on a chair, walks to the picture, takes a

Brush from one hand with his other, paints.

VII

I'll tell her she chose thy wrong fear. "Unhang the mirrors,"

I yelled, banging on her door. She banged the door open,

And said, "No fear is wrong," a sybil. There was liquidating

Of crystal, a barrelling of glass; rubble and quiet.

Nothing to look into but another human unknown face.

It is a tender and a terrible view. What has been given us

But the face that was given us naked, by our mothers

And our fathers, that was given them naked, in the wind?

I put the long of y hand on the long fine jawbone, and drew

The mouth toward mine, our four lips kissed, wet with it.

She breathed against me, all the twenty women I hug by night

For this need not to know who I am, or care any more,

But be empty and lost far enough to want to return. She

Took me away, the beautiful stranger, and then, dressed,

But not in clothes, we talked in the darkness, and talked.

I had never heard myself thinking the things I said to her.

Did she know I had wanted to batter and assault her? She

Knew, and threw herself open, that conquering defenselessness

Now we were disembodied, now we were two long nobodies,

Weary and wise, not far from the death of silence and sleep,

Then the most separate, starry and unearthly words come.

I learned her again, though she did not know what she said.

If she heard hat I said, only God or someone like Him cared,

But in the morning she and I would remember all Three of us.