Smears

The other night he caught sight of himself in the mirrored door of the bathroom cabinet, the poet says. Caught sight in the door opened and turned to face the hallway, and his body coming up the hallway (it wasn't far: a single step, a step and a half).

What did he see? A grey teeshirt, a face, and darkness behind. A teeshirt and a face, unexpectedly. It was his body in the corridor, it was him – it took a moment to see that. Coming up the corridor, one step, another – a moment and an interstice between moments.

He saw his face, his body coming towards itself as he came closer. But whose face was this? Whose body? If he reached out, how could he be sure that his fingers would touch his own image?

Only the man who lives alone thinks these things, the poet says. There are some things that reveal themselves only to the solitary.

The other day, he says, he returned to the flat and hardly knew where he was. The quiet flat, and no noise through the ceiling. Quiet, the wooden floorboards exposed and the room very big. Bigger than usual, he thought. It would take time to cross this room, he thought, although usually you could cross it in two strides.

Nothing was happening. Nothing – but it seemed to thicken, this nothingness. Some force of absence. Go away, it seemed to say to him. Leave me here. This is why people think they see ghosts, the poet says. It's why they think their flats are haunted. But his flat wasn't haunted. It was only itself, the same as itself. The same, the same – thickening, becoming tangible. The flesh of absence. Its shape.

He didn't want to leave, the poet says. He'd been somewhere already. He'd been out, and wanted to come home. But the flat wanted his absence. Wanted to fill itself with that: his absence. And it seemed to have grown, his living room. He'd never be able to cross it now, he thought, not with a thousand strides.

Should he leave?, he wondered. Should he go back out? Should he leave and let his absence thicken in the half-darkness? He shouldn't have been there, he thought. Shouldn't have caught it out, whatever was happening. Should have let it thicken, his absence, there where the red blind, pulled down against the light, but letting it through, tinged the whole room red.

He remembers Borges writes of a kind of labyrinth that is only a straight line, a path running forwards. The flat is leading me into itself, he thought. It leads nowhere; the flat is a dead end, a cul de sac, he thought. But that dead end, too, is a way, a kind of detour.

What was happening there? What did he surprise? Red light, through the blind. Should he stay and watch the light change? Should he wait for the day to decay, like bubbles popping on the beach after a wave had passed? Foam and seaweed, and the bubbles popping: that's what he would see. The decay of the day.

He'd caught it out, the poet says. He'd seen it. Something wanted to show itself, he says, like the smears that show on the window when light catches them. It's the same for the mirror over the mantlepiece, he says. When it's bright, very bright, you can see it has been wiped in round circles.

He thinks of Ozu's 'pillow shots' – those pauses in his films between scenes, between events and themselves. Nothing happens – and that's what happens. A cat licks its paw in the sun: nothing at all. The droop of the thick cord of a washing line, with its plastic clothes-pegs beaded with rain: nothing at all. Pillow shots: you can only see them from the corner of your eye. And something in them sees you too; something is watching behind the smeared mirror.

Sometimes he sees it in the sky, he says. In the whiteness and opacity of the sky. It seems to see, to send its gaze in all directions, although the sky does not see. It seems to reach him in its blindness, but it has no interest in him. The child feels the delighted gaze of the world upon it. Who isn't delighted by a child, a very young child? But when it is seen by the day? When the white sky sees in its blindness?

He sees it in the mirror, that same indifferent gaze, the poet says. He sees it: the gaze within his gaze. The other, his doubled body. What is it? A dead man, the poet thinks. Or at least it is not alive. But sometimes he fears that it is alive, that it lives as he does not, or that it has taken something of his life and lives it, away from him.

He thinks of what Heraclitus said about the mortals and the gods: we live each others death and die each others lives. Is it a god the poet saw in the hallway mirror? Is it a god in the blind seeing of the day, in white light? Is it his shadow, death to his life?