A room inside a room, all light and air
until we enter through a mirrored door
that, when we close it, folds into the wall
and disappears.
It’s almost empty; light above our heads
then space beneath us, so it seems we’ll fall –
father and son, gone gently to the dark
like Alice, in her slow-mo rabbit hole.
He tells me it’s a Spiegelkabinett
– he read it on a sign, but doesn’t know
what that would be in English.
I think a while, then say: A Mirror Maze,
remembering that scene where Orson Welles
and Rita Hayworth – recently divorced –
kill their reflections over and over again
in Lady from Shanghai.
He’s making random faces in the glass
to test himself, mock variants of loss
and cartoon fear, mad genius, evil twin;
he works them out, then calls so I can look
– no point pretending, if it isn’t shared –
and though I’m smiling, what I think he sees
is worry and cause for worry, how my life
is not the life he thinks of, when he thinks
of being happy.
I want to say it’s fine, it’s just not
how you think it is, or ought to be –
but now I’m at the centre of the room
turning around to see myself again
and then again, arrested in the glass,
an Everyman with nothing in his face
but fifty years of average wear and tear,
and somewhere, in those halted satyr’s eyes,
a stray voice from the schoolyard, folded neat
and put away a lifetime for safekeeping.
It’s me, of course, and yet, if I were pressed,
I couldn’t say who that man’s father is,
and no one here could be my father’s son;
what’s father to this shadow of a man
is some bright flaw or phantom in the child
he played for years, a glimmering of wild
that never showed itself, except in passing;
what’s son to him, a child he can’t protect
from public cheats and smug self-regulation,
liars in boardrooms, neighbours he cannot trust,
and children making sport of what he hopes
will last; because they do: we’re always
fearful of the image in the glass
that might, in some far nightmare, find us out
as mine does: me, my father, no man’s son,
the stumbling figure in the mirror maze
who knows what’s right – he’s talking about love –
but cannot make it happen, though the shots
ring out and all those persons he became
are shattered, till there’s nothing but the frame
where no one stands, though almost anyone
could find his way, through love and loss of love,
to this finale, orphaned, far for home.