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- I look at dark stubble, mixed in with white,
growing like thirsty grass out of my cheeks,
and I think, the years have been the antagonist
in this mild fiction,
in this soft face, which a rougher man may have
thought to be too gentle, of too much gentility
to match, blow for blow, the consequences;
from here, I witness my patrician rearing.
Then what returns to me is mere shadow,
mere reflection defying the tawdry touch,
but there - visible, texture of mud, lonely,
yet gracing the flat silver: lives in silver years.
*
This is the clarity that is not so clear,
this shiny lie, devastating in its calm,
but saying what is so, as if what is so, is so.
Any cloth of even simple fullness, can remove
condensation; a fog which obscures the truth.
So you stand, like resolution may bring mercy,
you stand on the whiteness of a tiled floor,
the cold side, as cold as the moon if flattened
to a thinness. You stand and you sense the image.
Your partner sleeps and does not know you are caught
between reality and images;
picturesque earth, and the glut of mind noise,
inherent in the slide and sound of descent.
*
Yes, one could kill the light, be draped in darkness,
with only the vague hint of porcelain,
to bring back the idea of mirrors which lurk;
the glassy nemesis of Alice and crew,
ficticious, yet in a deathly calm powder room.
This is a window with no sash.
This is a window to more windows.
And there is no sound, only tactile tales.
Look through it, be touched, the phlematic flame,
which is dance of slowness, as the gleam
says so much more, in its faux silence.
Drawn in? There is, nearly, a clutching of the sink,
that basin of cures, cool panaceas, beneath
hapless reflections, seemingly, of hapless others.
*
Once, by a poetess friend named Sue, I was told,
not to use the term 'doppelganger' in a poem.
It's awkward, she said. But she did not know the many
sides of me; dual images, talking heads of shame,
living where I am to live, the only flesh I know.
What is applicable has to be applicable,
applied, at least, to the theory of who we are.
So the many tales of counterparts exist not
only as tales, but as lessons, as reality,
as walking, thinking apparitions of cities.
Ah, counterparts! Knowledge is elusive;
it seems there will be so many to judge;
all of them, joined at the mighty cortex,
chiefly the artists, who see countless suns.
Splitting apart from this side of the vagrant
is no real hope at all, for he has his own heart,
his own notions; twins aging in a vacuum.
Often we are the siblings of ourselves.
*
Age of unreason as well as reason. The proof
has lived before. Not here in my face, but other
visages, familar, yet beyond what knowledge
could teach. Kenosis is sadness, nonetheless.
It is not relinquishing the wholesome divine,
though it may appear an honest snapshot,
it withers; relative middle years against
a relative death. The view tempers the view.
The eyes are, now, settling into their roles
of disparate, pearly tools;
tools sharpened by visions, frank shapes of the past.
Sleepily, one must view changes and breathe.
To watch is to think; to think is to be filled with fate.
Lamont Palmer
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