for Bruce

We have lived long enough in this house
to have filled it to bursting
with all we no longer need,

long enough

that the silver on the back of the bathroom mirror
has begun to flake away with age.
I don’t really mind that it’s flawed,
like so much else,
but you find a mirror to replace it
and ask my help to take the old one down.

It leaves a mirror-shaped blank
on the bathroom wall
over the sink where we taught our daughters
to wash their hands and brush their teeth.

Then you bring in the new mirror,
pristine, unaged,
and I help you hoist it,
our two faces looking grimly back at us again
as we measure to be sure it’s even
and fasten it in place. 

– Bethany Reid

Author’s Note: When I studied with Nelson Bentley, he used to say that recurring memories are poems asking to be written. The mirror story is fairly recent, but the image of removing one mirror and hanging another, me at one end, my husband at the other, was stuck in my mind–an image that kept replaying itself. I knew that it was somehow troubling me and that I needed to write about it. The memory of my little daughters brushing their teeth was a gift.