You Are My 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."
from "Mirror" by Sylvia Plath

I remember when you laughed
and I laughed and you suddenly
said, "You are my mirror!"

The breeze moving through green leaves recited pantuns
the field of lalang waved in gentle riposte.

I answered, "Yes, I'm your Snow
White mirror who each day
answer your step-mother question
saying, No, you are not
the most beautiful in the land,
you who come again tomorrow
will be more beautiflu than you
today."

I'm like a child who scooped water from a basin
and discovered I have stolen the jewel of the sun.

I am the silver and exact
eye of a little god, four-cornered,
not cruel but truthful, so I said,
"When you look into me
you are so near I read
the map of your iris, yet always,
always, the glass like a glacier
separates us. When you trace
the topography of my cheeks
your fingers run like rivulets
of rain down the window pane.
This sheet the glazier cannot
cut holds the silver that allows
you to come again and again
to me at the back
of the mirror where truth
continually lies."

The moon tired of making shadows shorter, stops its climb
up Jacob's ladder, hid in a pergola of dream-cumulus.