To make a clean sweep was the easiest part,
Though difficult enough. Anger of grief
Strengthened her hand and kept the silly heart
From dallying over his relics for relief.
To burn the letters, send back the keepsakes, wipe
His fingerprints off what little remained her own –
The girl stood over herself with a swift whip
And lashed until the outrageous task was done.
She had detached her flesh from his flesh, torn
It loose like a sea-anemone from a rock.
Now in that bare room where, lest he return,
All else was changed (she could not change the lock)
She took one careful invalid step, gauging
How much the ice of solitude would bear,
Then sat to her glass, as women do, assuaging
Chaotic thoughts with the clear, known image there.
No blood at the lips, no scars on the limpid brow,
Her face gazed out, vacant and undistracted,
A mere proscenium – nothing to show
For the tragedy, or farce, lately enacted.
True, it was not the first time nor the second
That love had lured her into a dead end.
She knew it all: but on this she had not reckoned –
The trick of a mirror upon the wall behind
Which cast in hers an endless, ever-diminished
Sequence of selves rejected and alone,
Cast back in her teeth the falsehood that she was finished
With love’s calamities, having survived this one.
Seven devils, each worse than the one she had expelled,
Entering now that swept and garnished room,
Image on image on image in the glass she felt
Sucking her down into a vacuum,
A hell of narrowing circles. Time and again
Would she sit at the glass, helplessly reviling
The self that had linked her failures into a chain,
An ineluctable pattern. Love’s too willing
Victim and love’s unwilling poisoner, she
Would always kill the joys for which she died.
‘Deep within you,’ whispered the fiends, ‘must be
‘A double agent, false to either side. …’
Fallen at last, hurled beyond hope or terror,
Gathering doom about her, the girl now saw
Her hand, which had not strength to break the mirror,
Grope for the sleeping tablets in a drawer.