I have a face that is not my face.
I don’t mean a mask. A real face
underneath the one you see, a face
emotionless and beautiful, like the moon.
I had to struggle with poems speaking
inside the warm covers of my solitary bed
emotionally reaching in my calculating head,
poems which even now defeat me. Sad,
confusing, and now, mercifully unread.
And then I wandered outside in the cool morning,
white, scudding, distant, still but hurrying, pale clouds
and there, halfway up one corner of the sky,
the lone moon, the same color as the clouds
but slightly brighter. My mind stopped. The scene
was ten times more emotional than all my poems
though nothing moved except the chilly breeze,
which sent me, meditating, back inside
the warm, dark house, to the mirror,
to the mirror, to the mirror.
Damn all this bad poetry!
Oh life that is a blot,
oh my face, which is not me.