Your Life

--William E. Stafford

You will walk toward the mirror,

closer and closer, then flow

into the glass. You will disappear

some day like that, being

more real, more true, at last.

You learn what you are, but slowly,

a child, a woman, a man,

a self often shattered, and pieces

put together again, till the end:

you halt, the glass opens--

A surface, an image, a past.