Reflections

Angela Barrett

Reflections

The furies are at home

in the mirror; it is their address.

Even the clearest water,

if deep enough can drown.

Never think to surprise them.

Your face approaching ever

so friendly is the white flag

they ignore. There is no truce

with the furies. A mirror’s temperature

is always at zero. It is ice

in the veins. Its camera

is an X—ray. It is a chalice

held out to you in

silent communion, where gaspingly

you partake of a shifting

identity never your own.

R.S. Thomas

 Mirrors, we’ve looked into them before. With Sylvia Plath,with Robert Graves, and Gwendolyn MacEwan - but this is different. Sylvia makes a mirror malevolent (I don’t disagree), Robert Graves has to look deeper than the mirror into history to see truly...

 "A mirror's temperature is always at zero." Why does that hit me so hard when I'm not sure what it means? Or maybe I do. Is it that there is no life there? (That’s why it’s cold.) I can see that’s true. The mirror image is not alive. It’s a solid. It’s frozen in a mercurial element, a silvered semi-liquid form. Do you understand what glass really is? An extremely slow-moving liquid. Come on! How is it that you and I look into this frozen, flat, reductive, two-dimensional not-pool and say to ourselves “That’s me.” ? How very improbable. How false a perception. And yet. We “graspingly partake”. We believe in it. We have faith. The mirror image is true. Right? And we moving, palpable, breathing, loving and hating, warm, driven to love and life beings, believe “this is what I am”! We running, fighting, wrestling, skating, dancing, falling, flying,  dancing bones and flesh reduce ourselves to this. We believe in coldness, we believe in “image”. As represented in flat unmoving shininess. How very stupid. How ready we are to believe a lie. Does the glass reflect our struggle? Does it measure the character we have sweated over against powers beyond our comprehension? Has it reflected our daily, mundane decisions to be kind in spite of hurt, in spite of the desire to have things our way, in spite of the self-serving lust for recognition? Only we can answer that. When that phrase comes up, “smoke and mirrors”. We don’t get it. What is that about? Illusion! Illusion, illusion. This “identity” is a trick, a sleight-of -perception, a switch of lies for truth. The question really is - where should we be looking for a true reflection of who we are? The Furies want to drown us. There is no truce with them. You heard it. Where can we see ourselves truly? 

Where?