Mirror

"I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful ‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
 
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish."


Syvlia Plath - Mirror


Bristol has some modern fountains, which I have blipped before once or twice.  At the moment they are switched off, apparently whilst some repair work is taking place, although there was no sign of any activity today.  One of the fountain's many features is a pair of large curved mirrors which are normally covered by a waterfall.  Today, in the dry, you could see the mirror itself.


Mirrors are such interesting things.  At first sight they just enable us to look at the world, but then as we stare, we realise that things are not quite what they seem.  Everything is reversed.  Perhaps it is this reversal of our world that has lead to fiction being packed with references to mirrors that suggest, in one way or another, that mirrors are perhaps not to be trusted.  From Lewis Carol's Alice, Snow White's wicked step mother's mirror, Ray Bradbury's carnival mirror maze through to Sylvia Plath's musings on ageing.


Perhaps it is not quite so wise to sit with our back to them?


[Works well in Large]