Any given verse of mine is likely to say what
I’ve often thought, but never very well
Expressed. In the mirror of these lines I look,
From certain angles, ruggedly persistent but,
From others, dim and obsessed. I’ve never
Been more frightened than the once or twice
I was wandering, lights out, around my home
At night and saw a shadow shifting in a glass
I’d momentarily forgotten existed. That is
How I feel occasionally revisiting these
Arrangements I usually refer to as poems.
There’s someone or something moving in
Here, in the penumbral intimacy of my home,
Moving on the far side of the room, paralleling.
Even once I realize it’s only my silhouette,
My own outline, and not another creature in here,
Even once my pulse returns to nearly normal
And I grin at what a goose I am in the lonely dark,
It bothers me that the fetch I spotted drawn
Was both a mere reflection off the surfaces
And a cut-out shaped by how I blocked
The little available light. When I scrutinize
More closely, having switched on a lamp
Designed and manufactured by other lives
Far away from mine, I see the familiar lines again,
The weary concerns. I greet myself again
And consider how possessed I am and have been,
But I’m muttering to scattered illumination
That cares no more for bouncing off of me
Than for caroming off ocean waves or lunar dust.
That’s not me I see in here, only the shifting light.
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