[13 mirrors] for anna

Every mirror is a translation—in it our lived selves slip from skin to sign, from sensed to seen, from felt to fractured. 
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The twin in the frame across from us will always speak another language. 
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In the mirror a scene of examination is always taking place, an enemy translation. If the face in the glass/page sometimes passes, it comes at a loss—an image that no longer feels the false smile it speaks through.
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Mirrors have always fascinated me, because I grew up in the far-left of my mother’s, watching the morning interrogation she called ‘putting her face on’. An act of penmanship that paused her breath. Such misery beneath the surface.
	The taste of the pencil in her eyes.
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In translation the word looks at itself being looked it, facing all its mirrors at once.
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The subject in the mirror, and on the page, flicker in and out of focus, both pink and dark, missing and palpable, resonant and vanished—the poem flickers with it, patterned in a play of scattered senses, angles of gestural light, half-illuminated links that glance across the mind—as if passing both the girl and the trees in a hall of mirrors, blinking them in, quickly, indelibly, a bright uncertain register…
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Everything in the past, and in the mirror, is both luminous and laid waste to, like this. Superficial and eternal. Blacked-out and revived.
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Can shadows be trapped in the mirror of a language, wait for us there like syllables of bad dream, the echo of dark trees? Residual blackness, humid, guessed-at. But somehow, to me, something flickers through the pink-beige glow, with the horrors of Celan’s ‘golden’.
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It’s exquisite how the clauses are smooth and groomed, fall regular—they’d pass examination—and yet create the flickering, the quivering, as if each comma were a shard, casting the elsewhere of mind-light to glint off distant surfaces, pick out demi-perception’s absent glimmering.
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The feeling of sunlight falling on fragments of past, present and future at once: only the broken mirror of poetry can catch the simultaneity of that—and only tilted in the hands of a poet this subtle, expert and lustrous. 
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A piece of mirror under the eyelid.
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How the word ripples from the philosophically-flavoured to the intensely interior, empirically tested by the fingertips’ memory, the mind’s wet mouth: the play of intellectual mirrors mists with our visceral knowledge, our reading breath.
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Each of our bodies is another mirror the glittering particles of language are caught—and come apart—within.

tracey slaughter