This morning I turned the mirror around; maybe

The poems I write about you to myself

Would catch me telling myself truth of me.

It is not that sort of a mirror. You cannot

See me through it, and I cannot see you,

And what I was looking at was not me at all.

At first I thought I had found that opposite

Yeats says lurks and wanders in the world

Somewhere for each one, his not-himself.

I had always sought this revelation of evil.

Confronted by my worst, I could re-make

My best self, counterparting the extremes.

That this other might be my angel, I demon,

Ancestral habit never allowed.

It was neither.

But it was both. Both faces surfaced there,

Almost smoothed into one on the thin glass,

And neither was naked, either one masked one.

I bad not thought the situation so desperate.

Demon would not rise, nor angel fall.

No triumph, no defeat, in fact no battle.

We grow not better nor worse as we grow old,

Only more like ourselves, and here I was,

Pinched in my own metaphor, that began

So harmlessly, supposing a double mirror.

The harm was in doing it by morning light.

Write when the world is miles away in bed.

Had I not been warned? I'd twitched a loose end

Before, and had the poem come clattering down,

A slither of rotted adjectives and whiches,

The ill-timbered concept a woodpile, and my hair

Dirtied by slow-settling dust; no broken bones.

There is a spell to say, that is never said.

But first the omens must be listened for,

And I had heard some, but they dwindled off,

And I mistook the silence for that other.

Well, I was lucky. One disaster in one day.

Consider the non-English-speaking physicist

Visiting Einstein, and how only in chalk

They happily blackboarded formulae for hours.

Glass for the glass-man, Connick always said,

Or it's no window. For the sculptor, stone,

A shapely three dimensions out of lump.

For Brahms' cellist his four-string alphabet.

And non-English-speaking critics for all of us.

Let all metaphor in words be the poet's.

I shall write poems about myself to myself,

Like this one, or not like this, or this very one,

And about you to you, a little night-wording

For word's sake on a well-tempered typewriter.