the best way to test whether a mirror is one way glass

      is to press your finger to its surface & see if the images connect

revision: the best way to test whether a mirror is one way glass

is to press your mouth to the glass & see if you taste the trapped

on the way your lips kiss back

      at night animal eyes are all mirror / all glint / forest become still life

      of blink & hunger / become wall of reflections / stars staining tinted glass

near-death is a word bloated with relativity / beached jellyfish splayed open

over dark sand / body fat with light / beauty reduced to mechanism for survival

      revision: the night’s eye is bloated with light / splayed over body

interrogate comes from the Latin roots inter [between] + rogare [to speak]

this captures none of the violence of this word

      early philosophers believed that all light came from within / human eyes

      that vision was simply the reflection / of fire that began within us

reflection comes from the Latin root reflectere [to bend back] / perhaps this word

knew in birth the violence of its name

      revision: the reflection speaks / in bending back the light / our mouths

      bloated with guilt / this too a reflection / perhaps the dark of the eye

      is a confessional

perhaps near-death is a different word in the mouth of the hunter / perhaps guilt

is the same / silence is every species’ first language / a mechanism for survival