i

In a state-funded rehabilitation clinic you were asked during art therapy to make a self portrait from memory. You ended up with a portrait of memory. In an attempt to draw your childhood home, you found staring back at you a long shape in blue crayon signifying at once an eel and an angel, a fish made of water and a wishing well.

ii

At the museum you move to leap headfirst into the canvas, but hesitate, certain you will break your nose. Apocalyptic turpentines, graphite on paper, hand stretched threads of canvas, thick globs of pigment, umbras and ignitions. Peering in on a portrait of a lady in her nightgown looking apathetically out the window, you feel yourself a voyeur, you feel yourself as her, you feel yourself feeling and feel a fraud. As a child, you didn’t understand why you weren’t allowed to touch the canvases. Looking at a Pollock, six years of age, you felt the innocent animal impulse to lick the painting. Now you wish it would lick you instead—its ochre pallet unashamed.

iii

You begin to wonder if the object is observing you back. You look at the daisies in front of the halfway house and consider if they are alive, expectant. The thought of those yellow irises with white petals for eyelashes and their pollen-laced dreamscapes makes you shudder. The word daisy, of Anglo-Saxon origin, meaning Day’s eye—as though the light itself were looking. What are the flowers thinking if they live without language, without minds? You did it, once, when you were new, when your mother was not the word mother, but a warm thing you emerged from, a heartbeat, the taste of milk. You spittled some incoherent utterance, to which she said, eyes full of tears, I love you, I love you! Looking at the newblooms, you feel as though you have entered a nursery made of light—a crowd of infinite flora, an infinite glee. Needless to say, when you go back inside, you refrain from stepping on lady bugs or the outstretched leaves from the palms, fearing they might wake and wail.

iv

You become fixated on dividing lines. The red curtain in the theater house, a kind of mirror. The audience, determined to forget themselves, dissolves the film strip in their psyches to become the actors. The actors, eager to extinguish their quickening pulses, begin to feed off the audience’s reactions to drift into dreaming. The dividing line closes, becomes a ring of red cloth. All this forgetting as a method of memory. Remembering yourself at the end of the illusion, you leave the theater, happy to have been lied to. The viewer, once silent enough, blurs their consciousness with the silent eyes around them. Psyche as a seascape. Note how you root for the villain, how you feel the prosody in the work of the undertaker. Somnambulent, the dividing line poses as mist. On the needle, one becomes an actor. You search the dim corridors of this litany, looking for the child you misplaced.

v

Sight becomes faulty and color becomes impossible. The unperceived light photons illegible to your iris, start calling you. Trying to imagine a color you’ve never seen before, you look out on that snow-plated valley until you fall asleep. A mirror as a sheet of ice, a glacier so thick you can’t see yourself staring back. Halfway to dreaming, you think you can hear yourself of the other side. Listen, listen… There’s a faint harmony in the frost, that ice-clad obelisk, that translucent voice growing brighter.

vi

You pay your therapist a great deal. You meet her as per usual on Wednesday at four in the afternoon. You tell her how happy you are to have gotten off the pipe. Just an hour ago you were hitting the glass bulb with a torch and blowing smoke rings in your underwear. You are paying her to act as a mirror. You are paying her to swallow the reflection you are projecting. You used to worry she would notice your cough, your sunken cheeks, your cold sweats. She may be doing so; but regardless, she isn’t letting you know either way. She just keeps nodding affirmatively, taking notes on her clipboard. It feels good to be seen. It feels good.

vii

You, a physician of windows and wondering thoughts, aim to dissect the aperture, the stained glass, the closed casement, the open. The reflected, half legible self, appears as apparition. The looker and the landscape intermingle in-frame. You, having faded, have a face ordained with morninglories, the black leaf-heads of the wrought iron gate, the passerby. At once a phantom and a half finished disappearing act, you watch your inverted lips smirk at the colloquial metaphor: I’m reflecting. The carnivorous observer eating the looking glass. The carnivorous looking glass eating its observer. We called it glass instead of meth. We called it clear. We called it crystal. We called it. We called.

viii

You, just close enough to the balmy breath of your lover, find your dim miniature in their iris. Watching yourself ebbing into them. Watching yourself ebb into two directions. Indiscreetly, you focus all of your attention on their fingertips, trying your best to relocate the shared place of tactile intake. Their fingertips on your shoulderblades become the shared place of sensation, the point of contact. Their fingerblades become your shouldertips. The I, inarticulate and dizzy, winces and returns to itself—yourself through their looking. On crystal, there were countless evenings spent hunched over the bodies of strangers, and still, you feel yourself a clumsy virgin in the arms of your love.

ix

You slip and fall upwards and become a firmament. A lazy atmosphere watching the ocean from its nebulous perch. The low-tides lull, the salt, soul and seaspray confused with the wind, hazy nimbic architectures, the arachnid legs of lightning bolts. You have read that the mirror, the eye, and the iphone front camera all invert the image. One never sees oneself truly. You read once that junkies dodge mirrors the same way they dodge police cruisers. Brushing your teeth affront that strange parallel: Salt, snot tears, toothpaste.

x

You're sick of yourself, you’re sick. In an attempt at radical empathy you begin moving outward. You become adept at watching—sometimes spending whole evenings trying to give words to the thoughts of brookes, trying to envisage the ache of empty embankments. You say the trees are androgynous, speaking their full throated foliage into the low-hanging night. Try though you might, you keep placing yourself inside the other—you keep using your own figure to understand the underbelly of the cliffbank. In AA, you felt the suspicion that the veterans of those rooms were talking to themselves. Looking into their eyes, you often forgot your own name.

xi

The object observing observer, the observer doing the inverse, looking in. A sparrow, fluttering at the dividing line, mistakes its reflection for a mate. Obsession made innocent. Narcissus in a detox ward with a snapped neck and feathers at the windowsill.

xii

You broke the glass in an attempt to murder the mirror. Now a hundred mirrors are cutting your bare feet. You keep going, determined to turn them into sand.

xiii

An ocean trying to be transparent. The self as a plurality. The plurality as a self. Water pollution as a condition of mind. Mind as a condition of water.

xiv

You meet yourself in a room behind your eyelids. You break bread over a pool of warm bright water. A desolate reunion.

xv

You meet the touch of your own hands.

xvi

You trace your hands with your thumb—blindly remembering your own face.

xvii

It’s been three years since you drank, but sometimes, your mouth waters.

xviii

Theorems made hideous by theologies.

xix

Theologies made hideous by theorems.

xx

Look, the stars a million years ago, up there. Spiderbites on the night's skin. You tried to count them but ended up turning them into numbers. Alabaster pebbles on a black cloth.