My kitchen window’s rippled glass: my picture of near-budded forsythia, pine top, flicking chickadee. A mild hallucination of view.
By forsythia, top, etc., I mean pencil against paper hinges 1) what I think I see with 2) what you think I see, as a result 3) what you think you see.
I didn’t mention the brick chimney stump poking its thumb up the far side of a pitched roof. By that, I mean add chimney to 1) 2) 3).
Muster our mirrors, built from what compels our look, what looks like me saying to myself, that’s like me. Therefore what we erase [plastic bag in a tree]. Thirty years of looks through this window, confirming a mirror, pleasing, on the obverse. Reverse: a portrait with its face turned to the back of the closet.
My people grew up with polar bears on Christmas cards. White polar bears with Santa hats swapping wrapped gifts with penguins romping on snow. To this day, my people receive pictures of white polar bears on fundraising address labels. We believe that “white polar bears” is a redundant phrase.
No thing not either mirror or portrait. What I consent to see = how I look. Confirm my self’s assembled heap.
By portrait, I mean my own Dorian Gray. Land-scavenging polar bears: soiled, greasy, abandoning ocean ice for whale carcasses on dry ground: portrait. [Ocean ice, that would be what exactly?] Christmas cartoon polar bears: mirror, peeling like wallpaper in a room with a portrait closet.
A rattled coffee mug puddles the kitchen table after seven verses of Paradiso Canto II. Don’t look at the clock. Keep mind on two things only – blotting the spill & Beatrice’s explanation of moon spots. No third thing [how many minutes since you last looked at the clock].
Decades of attempting to edit my vision in restroom stalls, practice not-seeing in cramped spaces where seeing specifically is the sense most stringently required. Uncensored vision resurfaces regardless, in repeated dreams of those places, multiple versions. Portrait dreams.
Burlington, Vermont: I want the impossible view, fusing Howard Street’s sharp tilt from my grandparents’ house downstreet, with downtown’s steep angle to the lake. No physical eye can master this from any point on land.
But home: home before home.
Paperback Aeneid with my deceased aunt’s college signature on a browning page. Drawers stuffed with ticket stubs. [I also throw away, discard, donate, as I forget, ignore, disown.] LP spines from childhood birthdays.
“There are mobs that make us happy, there are mobs that make us blue.”
There are mobs who look like me, Mister Too-Late-for-the-Love-In.
Fistful of souvenir pencils from my red pencil box with Kabuki masks on the lid.
1) Biblioteca Nacional de Puerto Rico –
2) Great Smoky Mountains Railroad –
3) Happy Gospel Center of Oneca, Florida –
Two of these three from my parents’ travels. Of course I can’t ask them now.
4) Stanley Rogers –
5) Joseph Iaquinto –
Who are these men? How did they become pencils?
No more Amherst Regional High School Chorale letterhead, Hotel Webster Hall, Pittsburgh Laboratory Theater, Idaho Shakespeare Festival, Borthwick Castle, Buenos Aires Hilton, Hotel Orto de’ Medici, Ecce Bed and Breakfast letterhead.
In 1970 I began listing all the books I read on pieces of letterhead. Letterhead has vanished. It’s shrunk to notepads.
Bookcases are stuffed with spent money, therefore old paychecks, meaning former jobs, meaning job interviews, meaning diplomas. For me therefore, parents who read books. Books breed books via money.
My father entered the hospital one final time and left a worksheet pad from the School of Engineering, University of Massachusetts. Observe side, blank to describe an engineering problem. Reverse, gridded for tables and diagrams. On both sides I keep listing my books until the final sheet lifts from the pad.
“What are your career goals, Mr. Miller?” One only: to buy more books, more music, and a rippled glass window to sit by for decades of the neighbor’s back yard settling in wavelets as I shift position.
See how in the mirror mobs bubble beneath my skin. Thirty trillion cells.
What’s the word? Eisoptrophobia? Fear of realizing that your mirror is also your portrait?