Danger! Self-Portrait

Self-portraits are surreal:

their function is phantasmal –

they court chiaroscuro:

you, of course, succumb.

You love to lavish form

with shade: it makes it

warm. And so you weave

with it the garment of a ghost –

which one day, chastened,

you will learn that this

pursuit of self can’t not –

and often terribly – invoke.

But now, the more you press

gradations into paper of your

pencil’s understandings

of the presences in shadow,

the more this thing, pretending

it is you, convinces you

it’s really looking back.

Another view may one day

peel off all its insubstantiality –

and tally up the lack.

But one blur in it lingers.

The indistinctness of the fingers –

whose amorphousness now,

oddly, makes you feel. As if

it bears relation to the real.

.