Searching This City’s Thrift Stores for Mirrors

Looking along each aisle for any sharp angle of light,

I walk past discarded hats and exhumed outfits,

past pots and pans and “Jesus Loves You” and “God

As Your Witness” signs, until finally a spark steps out

from that darkness and there’s one wavy sheet of

glass like a lake surface petrified and my figure

stenciled and groovy like a drawing from the ’60s in

a wanderer’s notebook—a sketch in one of Hesse’s

journals: like the Alps looming behind him, there’s

a largeness that follows me. To each of us our luggage.

With every glance I let go, one aisle and another

gone. Remembered mountains now flattening

with distance. Clouds pulled apart by a single

thread that I take and tie around my waist, a safe rope

of light to descend by. I climb into the basement of

the Salvation Army, fluorescent dance of bulbs

flicking Morse code, and fight my way through old

shoes, march past candleholders holding no candles,

come upon a frame and my figure, again, lit right there

in the middle of it. Then the doorbell blinks and

light becomes sound as a past self exits, or enters.