self portrait of the artist turning twenty-four
Some title you’ve put down there. But
that’s what you do: start strong, before
reality can dampen the
confabulations that your poor
nearsighted memory depends
on in the absence of a more
developed visual sense, and then
hang on and hope a poem forms,
which now and then does happen.
It’s not so much like looking for
an answer in a fogged-up mirror
as much as it’s like leaning toward
your bare reflection without fear
as lovingly as you can stand
and asking nothing of it. Dear,
this morning as you raised your hands
all cupped and overflowing, clear
hot water streaming down to land
between your image and your ideas,
to say that I was pleased is not
enough: I was relieved to see
that four and twenty years have wrought
of you a poet, serious
beyond your needs, who yet when caught
disrobed of your precarious
suspicion of appearances
and washed of all your various
pretensions is, and cannot help
but be, good-looking — and what
is more, appealing to yourself.