I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful --
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
I enjoyed this poem mostly because of the unorthodox point of view it is told in, and the implication of a shifting tone. At the beginning of the poem, the narrator, the mirror, explains its life and how it spends its days. It explains that it has formed a relationship with the pink speckled wall that it is stationed across from and looks at all day. The mirror vents about the separation created between it and the wall when the lights in the room go out. It is interesting that the author of this poem attempts to see how a mirror would feel if it was personified. In the second stanza, the mirror exclaims that the woman that looks into it is unappreciative. The mirror feels as if it is doing everything that it is supposed to, yet the woman always seems to be disappointed. The mirror experiences a woman's evolution from a young pretty girl to an aging woman who has lost some of her beauty. The mirror sees how this appearance change affects the woman's life and how she has let it take over her life. I most enjoyed the personification of the mirror and how it first did its job, but responded to anger by judging the woman.
