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# Objects In This Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, by Richard Jackson
- URL: https://joshualore.com/inthemiddleway/objects-in-this-mirror-are-closer-than-they-appear-by-richard-jackson/
- Published: 2019-03-05T14:01:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-06T06:22:59.000Z
- Author: Joshua Lore

Because the dawn empties its pockets of our nightmares.  
Because the wings of birds are dusty with fear.  
Because another war has eaten its way  
into the granary of stars. What can console us?  
  
Is there so little left to love? Is belief just the poacher's  
searchlight that always blinds us, and memory just  
the tracer rounds of desire? Last night,  
under the broken rudder of the moon, soldiers  
  
cut a girl's finger off for the ring, then shot her and the boy  
who tried to hide under a cloak of woods beyond their Kosovo  
town. Listen to me, - we have become words  
without meanings, rituals learned from dried  
  
river beds and the cellars of fire-bombed houses.  
Excuses flutter their wings. Another mortar round is  
arriving from the hills. How long would you say  
it takes despair to file down a heart?  
  
When, this morning, you woke beside me, you were mumbling  
how yesterday our words seemed to brush over the marsh  
grass the way those herons planed over  
a morning of ground birds panicking in their nests.  
  
When my father left me his GI compass, telling me  
it was to keep me from losing myself, I never thought  
where it had led him, or would lead me. Today,  
beside you, I remembered simply the way you eat  
  
a persimmon, and thought it would be impossible for each  
drop of rain not to want to touch you. Maybe the names  
of these simple objects, returning this morning  
like falcons, will console us. Maybe we can love  
  
not just within the darkness, but because of it. Ours is  
the dream of the snail hoping to leave its track on the moon.  
We are sending signals to worlds more distant  
than what the radio astronomers can listen for, and yet-  
  
And yet, what? Maybe your seeds of daylight will take root.  
Maybe it is for you the sea lifts its shoulders to the moon,  
for you the smoke of some battle takes the shape of a tree.  
On your balconies of desire, in your alleyways of touch,  
  
each object is a door opening like the luminous face of  
a pocket watch. Maybe because of you the stars, too,  
desire one another across their infinite,  
impossible distances forever, so that it is not  
  
unthinkable that some bird skims the narrow sky where  
the sentry fires have dampened, where the soldier, stacking  
guns in Death's courtyard, might look up, and remember  
touching some story he carries in his pockets, a morning  
  
like this blazing through the keyholes of history, seeing not  
his enemy but those lovers, reaching for each other, reaching  
towards any of us, their words splintering on the sky,  
the gloves of their hearts looking for anyone's hands.