My many
faces in a mirror - multiplying
faces of one being,
dully and mistily ever changing,
erring
till the death.

My voices of many pasts and buried pangs
looming into the uncertainty
of the fleeting moment's anxiety
for arrest and release.

My memories -
generations flowing into generations,
like clouds of permanent change,
wind across the circles
of earth's heavens

and there are waters rising
dangerously higher
with the engulfing of  unforgiven faults
and tragedies not sufficiently drowned
in tears of blood and anguish

and there is the baptism
in the bath of self-confession
leading to glimpses of patches azure
in a sky of cold and brittle
shining glass.

The mirror shatters into its atoms
and while they escape
I remain
none the wiser
just being those faces,
those voices,
those memories,
those waters,
that baptism

both recognizable
and totally alien.