Late Meditation
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Half-naked, fevering, standing up, with a feather inked until it bled just above, newly above, the collarbone, near the neck, curved there, an apostrophe,
I am what that is: that surface, ekphrastic, wrong to touch—but touch me, it begs, so I try it, extend a finger toward no success. Must it be
true: that everything I make will be a self— an eulogy for what it isn’t, a set of lines across the skin, even a dusky reflection? I am myself looking
at this picture of myself, made of metal and light, light and glass. It’s there. I can see its limits. I can see my eyes, each haunted as the letter O,
they are defining me, this pair of empty suns—but how empty? Can’t a space be charged with accent, what creeps
outside the visible? What I see inside the mirror— is it maybe what I don’t see, what instead I’ve been made to perceive: that voice, [End Page 523]
colonial, scribbled in wrong color, twisted tones, You’re such a problem child, whiten yourself, straighten your speech— But could it be
that what terrifies first is not the figure in the mirror but is the mirror: fact that I can at all be reflected, can be made to be seen and deeper
than what I’ve been taught depth is. When I wrote earlier “I’m trying to write obsession into it,” I meant that deepness, that reach toward a dead loss, an understood failure,
as when I had them scratch this dumb feather into my skin, this one I’m at pain to touch, as if communion were possible, as if my body were mine, I was saying
I myself am too heavy, a screen too scored to lift up— I think there is a quality of pleasure in failure. More:
a need for it. That’s why I’d stare at a burning car, cross, the dark skin of a man all fire on the shoulder of the road. That’s why when he’s absent,
I invent him. That’s why I’m pushing this wound of myself to find a text of myself: I need to see its dying to believe it, [End Page 524]
to make out its sad and sick scripture. “Do not imagine you can abdicate,” a teacher once said. That’s my elegy: a mirror in a mirror in a mirror. [End Page 525]
Rickey Laurentiis is the recipient of fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in several journals, including Boston Review, Fence, jubilat, Oxford American, and Poetry. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St Louis, where he was a Chancellor’s fellow.
