When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful --
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

A mysterious asymmetry
for a mirror.
A passing fancy-
maybe
I should jump in
and risk silver shadows of glass
in my throat or drowning in the tepid
pool which never was
a mirror.

One wonders at the Other.
Too timid to reach out
and hold the Other's hand.
The dread of grey disappointment
is too heavy to stir, but the
canary in One's throat longs
to test the air. Patience
was never One's virtue. One feels
more prone to
anguish.

Extend your hand and I will not
let you fall.
A grasp of relief.
One and the Other both
free from marble waiting and
free also from the
emotiondeath of
the mirror.
andsowewait