The Room of Facing Mirrors

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Nothing is omitted. Whatever 
is evident in our synoptic vantage 
collects: The audience is added row 

to row, the chairs submit to accumulation, 
angling fashionably to their vanishing 
point (or are there two?) Crescents of light, 

projections of shadow are strung in cords 
to missing corners. The wedgewood, patera 
ceiling slides efficiently into 

an economized blue, as symbol 
of day’s dim incremental rise in blue. 
This is the glass of awakening. 

Amid the scattered sounds of morning, 
we approximate oursevles, amused 
at a yawn, a multiplicity of yawns. 

From our half-focused stares, we recognize 
ourselves front and rear, these elliptical 
embarrassments in seeing one’s self 

as others do: a patch of hair upright, 
some accident in our attire, 
the backside of the best self’s stage. 

We sit before this gallery 
of witnesses finding a renewable 
kinship with each, even with the distant 

and slightly darkened visage—there 
in the tapioca colored garment. Others 
before us have noticed in the sixth 

or seventh reenactment, a slight 
independence in detail—perhaps 
in the grouping seen off to the right, 

the salmon furnishings buoying them up.
Still, to most appearances our thin,
balding coach has drilled our ensemble well. 

Peripheral movements, panels 
of cloud and woodside have been 
deleted. The focus is rather on 

the bold redistribution of light 
(its passing from the hair to the brow
and eyes) as our host enters 

unannounced, a visual echo. 
We all rehearse arrivals, that 
and unpunctuated time. 

There’s a marginal complexity 
in having two centers, to stretch 
both north and south, but the stories 

of the earliest works attest 
to such a collective rise 
and flowering. One does not soon 

forget the laminated 
history of brine and wonder 
at this junction of time and space, 

where each concentric posture of the self
or other is its own harmonic, chimes:
a realm of possibilities. 

True, there are no unmistakable 
household smells, familiar tunes, just
a happy resemblance letting itself go, 

indefinite in both directions, 
perpetual in its endorsement of here,
where we wish for no lesser place.