Sitting wide-eyed at water’s edge,
surrounded with pregnant unknowns,
hooked by the reflection of moonlit trees,
I listened to the story written beyond their roots,
shrinking first and then enlarging.
First I became a bell,
a moment more, a camera’s eye,
and then a mouse-nosed princess endowed with second sight
seeing myself as a kid,
lifting mother’s mirror from the wall,
carrying it like a tray,
stork-stepping through the house,
my eyes fixed on the inverted world
translated in the mirror’s face reflecting
between my hands.
Assuming a pretended power encouraged
by the upwardly turned mirror,
I walked across ceilings,
door posts, light fixtures,
inched across the wooden deck,
passed unscathed through the
sharp thorns of the lemon tree and
arrived exalted in the
high nest of the walnut tree.
Mesmerized by the oddity of me regarding me,
I swam beneath an arch of glass stained brilliant
within Sacre Coure’s soaring circle of sound.
In candle light, a thousand strong,
the music played the present, future, past –
a rhapsody of rescue and not a dirge of tragedy.