Old Love by Francesca Beard
Saved by my poetry buddy again! I must say that the bevelled bit of my bathroom mirror drives me nuts. I’m always seeing flashes of something in it. Of course, I’m usually startled and would never describe my experience the way Beard does in this poem. The last two stanzas blew me away. Wow.
Old Love
By Francesca Beard
In the glance of a mirror, I saw a timid shape
standing in the bevelled bit,
the thin prismatic strip on the edge of the frame
and thought it was a ghost of you.
What are you doing here?
You can’t just appear, without warning,
like we were used to it being.
You seemed blurry, like the first and the last time.
In between, how huge you were.
The shadow you cast let much sleep beneath its shade.
You wavered in the air, vanishing.
How I wanted to hold out my hand,
so that your sad ghost
could crawl into a friendly cradle.
Of course it was nothing—a trick of the light
and a splinter in the eye
of a hair gummed across the heart.
No, you are frozen where you were that last time,
deaf and dumb,
a wax-work in the pin-hole museum,
while your tiny, passionate soul,
marooned in the middle of nowhere,
cries and stretches out its arms.
Meanwhile, on my own rock,
on the other side of the world,
I think of you, blind and stumbling in the dark,
while the rescuers throw the beams of their torches
into the wrong cave.
