Mirror
A finger to his lips, as if to say
goodbye, or be still now, I’ll soon be
gone, but as it wasn’t clear, he stayed,
staring in the mirror, his image
imitating him, in its moment,
unknowing as to what it meant, and
why, why the want of words, the silence.
He turned away, turned to where he was
before, a thought ago, with nothing
on his mind, but where to stand, and what
to say, a step away from there, where
the mirror stood, as if in wait, as
if it might incite his lips, at last,
to open to what was hidden there.
Ray Malone is an Irish writer and artist living in Berlin, Germany, who has been working on a series of projects exploring the lyric potential of minimal forms, often based on various literary and/or musical models. His work has been published in a number of journals in the US, UK and Ireland.
See more of his work in 9.3 and 8.2 and 5.3