i

In a state-funded rehabilitation clinic you are asked during art therapy to make a self portrait from memory. You end up with a portrait of memory. In an attempt to draw your childhood home, you create a long shape in blue crayon, 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 woman 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.

iii

You begin to wonder if the object is observing you back.

iv

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? 

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 incoherence, 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.

v

Sight becomes faulty and color becomes impossible. The unperceived 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 on the other side. Listen, listen… There’s a faint harmony in the frost, ice-clad obelisk, translucent voice growing brighter.

vi

It feels good to be seen.

vii

You pay your therapist a great deal. You meet her as 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.

viii

You, a physician of windows, 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 morning glories, 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.

xi

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.

x

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.

xi

You slip and fall upwards and become a firmament.

xii

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 before that strange parallel: Salt, snot tears, toothpaste.

xiii

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 brooks, 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.

xiv

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.

xv

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.

xvi

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.

xvii

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

xviii

You meet the touch of your own hands.

xix

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

xx

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

xxi

Theorems made hideous by theologies.

xxii

Theologies made hideous by theorems.

xxiii

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.