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Old Liquid Glass

The sun on those vermiculate brown leaves
and red berries. Outside
there is a window mirror
some call a mirror.
If one peers through it
it predicts one’s death.
Dare to look?

My death involves the color red, charts
and maps. Also gold lamé
and strangulation.
I think you were there.
Do you have anything to say
in defense of your future self?

My living room table
consists of a pile of old crackers, pieces
of tape who’ve lost their stick, and pictures of you
I took surreptitiously at last month’s ball .
You were dressed as a King
and I was a lass festooned in your graces .

You soaked me like a charm in perfume.
You–I basked in the aubade (pronounced here as äb-äd-A, with the primary stress on the third syllable) of your smile.

So what do you have to say for yourself
for stomping into my room, mussing
the curtains and bed sheets, and smooshing up my heart.
As though I were a recipe
to follow and be done with.
Toss after baking.

No! I didn’t come over here to talk about that.
How would you know
what an ass you could be in the future.
Only alcoholics have such omniscience,
and you are definitely not an alcoholic.
Pity.

A pity you couldn’t
be a one who has the right to supple hearts,
your own pickling process incomplete .
No.

But when you looked
in the mirror
it struck you blind .

The mirror shows you only
the lives of other loves, what they didn’t tell you.
They don’t trust.

You saw me
shoot myself in the stomach.
I wore gloves
and had a smear on my face.
I didn’t know
anyone would be watching.

The mirror doesn’t show
all the daisies I pluck for you.

That is in the present.
Presents don’t qualify to be sought by the mirror.

Seek the mirror.
This mirror specializes
in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
If you can see where something is you
can’t see where it’s going (the past.
We are always seeing
the past, even now
on the pages these ideas
are gone), and if you can see
where something’s going (the future–
what mortals consider death) you
don’t know where
it is.

Hence your blindness.
So if I put this cloth in your hand
and tell you it’s gold lamé you have to believe me.

Why wouldn’t you?
After all you saw the future already .

Though, of course, time doesn’t exist.

Who needs that seeing perception now .
If I take your hands
around my neck
do you understand?
Purple royalty checks
and bed sheets and you here with me.

I begin to feel a tingle I mistake for your love.
You mistake it for shame or anger.

I become an apple you want cidered.
I can tell you that afterward you will
draw around it, an arrow
through a battered heart, a man
who needed the abuse.

No man here. Just gods .
There are plenty of schools
to teach you Braille in the day or night.