The thrill was to find myself
lost, turned
completely around in a maze of
mirrors
until I could not step forward
without running
into myself, could not turn one
way or the other
without a distortion of who I was
rising
in a swirl of grinning teeth and
bulbous eyes.
I was not Alice stepping through
her looking-glass
into a world of red queens and
white knights.
I was a boy, safe in the belief I
would leave
these illusions behind as soon as
I felt my way
past each one, touching the convex
or concave
surfaces one after the other until
I again found
open air and solid earth. What I
could not
have imagined is that I would
discover,
when I stepped from the House of
Mirrors,
a lifetime of lovers and friends
filling the grounds
of the carnival and spilling into
the future,
all of them poised like
mannequins—
those who would betray me and
those I would betray—
and a wife and children and
brothers and sisters
and there, in the very front of
the crowd,
a mother and father. And as I
stepped
among them, already no longer a
boy, I touched
each face, felt the curve of each
forehead, traced
the line of each lip, believing as
I did that this
was the real world, that these
were real people,
not distorted versions of myself,
but flesh and bone, hair and
tooth,
finger and toenail, so why, I
wondered,
did their faces waver and shimmer
as I passed,
and why did my hand seem at times
to move
right through them, as if they
were images
on a screen of mist, perhaps even
reflections,
mirrors revealing a world hidden
from me,
a world somewhere behind my wide-open eyes?
This poem appears in House of Mirrors
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