Poetry is
a system of rotating
mirrors, gliding harmoniously,
displacing light and shadow in the dressing room: why
the ground glass? As if talking – conversing
with tablecloths and soft music – I were to say to you, my love,
that this or that reflex is the poem,
or an aspect of it: a poem may be written
about the dead Duchess of Yekaterinburg,
and when the sun sinks red in the windows, I recall
her blue eyes… I don’t know, I’ve spent such long hours
on night trains reading crime novels
(alone in the empty house, we opened the armoires)
and one night, on the way to Berna, two men kissed in my car
because it was empty, or I was asleep, or it was dark
(hand seeks for hand, body for body)
and now the glass turns
and this aspect is hidden: real and fictitious,
convention, in other words, and the things we have lived,
the experience of light in the wintertide forests,
the strain of imposing coherence – it is mirror play –
the acts that dissolve in irreality,
the yellow, the leprosy, rust; the moss that blots images,
the tar slathering the faces of the boys in canotiers,
all that died one afternoon with the bicycles,
chrome reds submerged in the cisterns
bodies (in space as in time) in slow motion beneath the waters.
(Dark like the backing of a mirror in shards, the dressing room is the axis of this poem.)