Wednesday, 17 November 2010

Soft Glass


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Glen Echo, Maryland. A view of the entrance to the midway, showing people in front of the mirrors
Glen Echo, Maryland. a view of the entrance to the midway, showing people in front of the funhouse mirrors: photo by David Myers, 1939 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



The passage through the looking-glass
leaves us looking back
but if there's a crack in the glass...?
Caught in transit between the two states
death and life, without
any sense of certainty which is on which
side of the glass, so that
to hold a mirror up to life may equally be
to hold a mirror up to death
thought Alice




Washington, D.C. A corner of a bedroom, probably in a rooming house for government clerks, showing reflected in a round mirror above a dresser a woman doing handwork

Washington, D.C.: corner of a bedroom in a rooming house for government clerks, with dresser mirror showing reflection of woman doing handwork: photo by David Myers, 1939 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
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3 comments:

  1. aditya18 November 2010 at 03:53

    Right now you are holding a poem to me and I think .. well yeah .. I think. It isnt easy always to tell the guy what you think of a/his poem(s). Too much of talk, if I should say sometimes does not let the poem bloom.

    I am a very common man so it is strange i should say such things. But when I re read, by the time the third line of this poem ended, I actually felt a crack in the glass you were holding up to me. Both these 'mirror' poems are great !

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  2. TC18 November 2010 at 07:24

    Thank you, Aditya. One feels a bit ashamed to be sharing such gloomy reflections, the ruminations of an old person with more past than future to contemplate, and confronting a "glass" that is streaked and clouded with cracks. But... I suppose this, too, is not such an uncommon experience.

    (It's probably important to know Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass," to make sense of the last line here.)

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  3. aditya18 November 2010 at 08:53

    I know I know.. Dont stop but. I have (also)always relished you riding your nots, nevers and negations on to the fine of edge of reasoning and serving them right in to the reader's ears. Both in your commentaries and one or two off poems.
    I was about to write adding in and asking you to tell something about the last line and then I thought of finding out the Lewis Carroll connection in detail. Quiet telepathy at work I suppose. Cracked mirrors did remind me of Ulysses and Oliver Wilde.

    In the background a song ends with-

    I heard you in my toilet bowl
    you calling out my name

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