Sitting, strung taught, on a wooden stool, a linen dress with a shawl, a woman with straight open eyes is looking at you. Wiry grey hair with flecks of black, and mouth pursed to speak some thing you must listen to.
“You are here to accompany me.”
“In what?”
“This. This scene. This reflection in a mirror. In our mirror, where we come to see ourselves, and have done so for ever.”
Sitting, straining up, on that same wooden stool, black dress, cotton with furls. The same eyes staring, though more occupied than open. Black hair with flecks of grey, and lips bit with a curl to force a smile.
“Is that me, then?”
” Was I this?”
“This woman, faring weather, and grown. Relenting but vivid. I could paint her”
Standing, abruptly, an affront. The stool against the wall behind, and an infant restless to the side. Clothes, floral, dressed on. Hair plain and full. And eyes somewhere else seeing.
“I see past myself, and was not looking to remember then”
“You remember despite yourself”
“I remember my anguish”
Red lips burnished, and hair falling full in a curl on a spring cheek. Kneeling, looking at the small things, the lashes blacked, and nose with a little mark of the sun. A blouse, white against olive skin and skirt felt fitting.
“I saw then but only to see through others eyes”
“You missed seeing it all together then, but you can remember now”
“Yes, I can be the other eyes”
Brows frowned, in deviant young judgement. A mess of fullness and crackling life. Clothes, a sister’s, ill fitting and too solid, so her body isn’t seen. Sitting on a pillow, eyes full of words from a page, darted up from, and caught looking. Eye’s that see but don’t dare linger on a look. And skin and hair straight and narrow in attempt to stay some sameness.
“What was I reading?”
“You were reading about lives to live, and what they have in them”
“And I had a whole one in me to come”
“You did”
“Did I see myself before?”
Blurred eyes pass looking with all things soft all around. Except for a toy, red and yellow in sharp rendering, and focussed upon. A woman with a straight face, and black hair with white threaded through, and those wise eyes.
“She picked us up”
“She did”
“She died not long after that. I wonder what she had seen in this mirror”
“She was gentle and safe”
“That’s what we saw. Look at us now, perhaps we are too”
“Still looking, remembering and to remember yet.”
Blue in the Face 