Plath

Mirror  Sylvia Plath   

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.  
What ever you 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 a 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.