The Mirror

The deaths about you when you stir in sleep hasten me toward you. Out of the bitter mouth that sours the dark, I sigh for what we are who heave our vines of blood against the air. Old men have touched their dreaming to their hearts: that is their age. I touch the moment's dream and shrink like them into the thing we are who drag our sleeps behind us like fear. Murderers have prayed their victims to escape, then killed because they have stayed. In murdering time I think of rescues from the thing we are who cannot slip one midnight from the year. Scholars have sunk their eyes in penitence for sins themselves invented. Sick as Faust I trade with devils, damning what we are who walk our dreams out on a leaning tower. Saints on their swollen knees have banged at death: it opened; they fell still. I bang at life to knock the walls away from what we are who raise our deaths about us when we stir. Lovers unfevering sonnets from their blood have burned with patienc...

I look through my dead friend's eyes at the house of love: plaster scabs from lath, windows break out in toothy gapes, doors stagger from their pins. See what a feast this is, my love, my love, our shelves of mouse turds, dusts, and dirty damps! I try this vison on like the wrong glasses and every straightness quivers to a blur, and every surface whorls to drink me in. Well then, this is a world for twisted eyes. Or if my eye offend me I'll pluck it out. And still be chanceled in our breathing bed, the dusk behind the taper and the cup, as I was once—a holy man, though I lost my holy ghost, my terror, and my sin when I had got my own death down by heart. And there's no nonsense like it. If I forgive that death, I lose my last prayer. Let us live. [From: Ciardi, J. (1955) As If; poems new and Selected . New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, p10]