Mirror

I grow old under an intensity

Of questioning looks. Nonsense,

I try to say, I cannot teach you children

How to live.—If not you, who will?

Cries one of them aloud, grasping my gilded

Frame till the world sways. If not you, who will?

Between their visits the table, its arrangement

Of Bible, fern and Paisley, all past change,

Does very nicely. If ever I feel curious

As to what others endure,

Across the parlor you provide examples,

Wide open, sunny, of everything I am

Not. You embrace a whole world without once caring

To set it in order. That takes thought. Out there

Something is being picked. The red-and-white bandannas

Go to my heart. A fine young man

Rides by on horseback. Now the door shuts. Hester

Confides in me her first unhappiness.

This much, you see, would never have been fitted

Together, but for me. Why then is it

They more and more neglect me? Late one sleepless

Midsummer night I strained to keep

Five tapers from your breathing. No, the widowed

Cousin said, let them go out. I did.

The room brimmed with gray sound, all the instreaming

Muslin of your dream . . .

Years later now, two of the grown grandchildren

Sit with novels face-down on the sill,

Content to muse upon your tall transparence,

Your clouds, brown fields, persimmon far

And cypress near. One speaks. How superficial

Appearances are! Since then, as if a fish

Had broken the perfect silver of my reflectiveness,

I have lapses. I suspect

Looks from behind, where nothing is, cool gazes

Through the blind flaws of my mind. As days,

As decades lengthen, this vision

Spreads and blackens. I do not know whose it is,

But I think it watches for my last silver

To blister, flake, float leaf by life, each milling-

Downward dumb conceit, to a standstill

From which not even you strike any brilliant

Chord in me, and to a faceless will,

Echo of mine, I am amenable.

Source: Poetry (February 1958)