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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.

The porch light flickers on the rain-dark street,
Where hollow plastic skulls lie in the weeds;
Behind each door, familiar fears retreat
To rooms where something waits for what it needs.

No costumed stranger knocks upon the door,
Nor drags a heavy chain across the grass;
The terror waits beneath the kitchen floor,
And leans its cold forehead against the glass.

A childhood coat still hanging by the stair,
The screen spits static by the empty bed;
You lock the deadbolt on the silent air,
To bar the ghost that thirty years have fed.

It does not come with teeth or trailing sheet,
Nor raise a voice to tell you why it came;
It walks the empty hall on soundless feet,
And in the dark you almost speak its name.

No mask can hide the child you would forget;
The coat still hangs. It almost fits you yet.