Little Mirror
The shard flared beside a tidepool
between boulders and clumps of kelp …
Turned and lifted, set down
many times, its sides softened
by shifting currents, the shard
left to face last night’s moon, its push
and pull, returned her full face.
Morning light travels to the bonded
silver backing, bright as an Arctic island map,
salt-eaten and stone-chipped under glass —
transparent ponds (pinholes) and small lakes (where torn)
now part of me, where I see myself
up through a past, its tarnished surface
a sparse tundra across thawed terrain.
On the gray flipside, its imperfections make
a constellation of tears and pinholes
across stellar distances
from the shard’s tilting drift. I imagine
stories from a mirror, faces from a room,
how someone saw themself
and what they faced walking away,
aware and unaware of destinies, how
someone tossed a cracked mirror
into the bay, how an undraped mirror
with its trapped soul fell in a village room …
the shard from a lob of glittering light,
shattered portrayals revolving through depths,
a settling glimmer on the floor of the bay,
then a fish swimming close
to the image of something familiar,
but from another world, this molten
phenomenon, which might be wreckage
from a lighthouse keeper’s mantle,
or refugee’s reminder, what sank unwanted …
shard of the forfeited, roll of a die, not
like anything else from the tides.
If I don’t take it, I thought, it might
never give back a human face, my face
among others once reflected there,
the momentary thoughts, the memories
conjured, but never the mirror’s perspective:
here we see ourselves, as all reflection
here — the reversal — but true the returning,
left eye is right eye of who I am
traveling up through glass. I hold the shard
close to read resemblance faithful to the figure
from the bonded, pitted silver below the surface,
and staring into the island map — not
as through a windowpane, seeing the world
past my reflection — I see distances, nonetheless,
a reflection about a face how far to me
from this object of witness, of instant erasures.