Mirror

Behind a bathroom stall this gas station queen
checks her lipstick smudged over streaks of mean
A man beneath the glass has painter’s eyes
and carves her features stone in petrified disguise
Mirrored back to her is a face of marble mountains
which freeze below wide stained glass windows
He paints upon her alabaster skin
ruby caves and fields of calla lilies
But bubbles boil from those caves
And murmurs from the mountains made
We all whisper: what does he see?
in the portrait of a pretty lady
She doesn’t see herself — she sees a pearl
polished blindly white in a whirled world
The shadow on her face is receding
And she wed herself to the mirror’s meaning
But then her ears retained from far
a tempered rhythmic change in music
Her body wrought in stone was breathing
as if her heart were actually beating
The notes wailed high and long
A mother’s cry, a lover’s song
This woman’s work! A life of glass!
She gasped when she saw it pass
What wrinkled skin and lovely creases
who shattered man in shards and pieces
The plaster rubble spills upon the floor
Like cracking eggs before a boil
She scrapes it off and from her face
Emerges wet hot color bleeding
In silver ribbons round her head
do writhe the shifty springs of life
where she has split mirror and wife
And left the painter watershed

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