Poetry Response : Mirror Image

Mirror Image by Louise Gluck

Tonight I saw myself in the dark window as
the image of my father, whose life
was spent like this,
thinking of death to the exclusion
of other sensual mtters, so in the end that life
was easy to give up, since
it contained nothing: even
my mother's voice couldn't make him
change or turn back
as he believed
that once you can't love another human being
you have no place in the world.


Many a time I've looked at my reflection in a dark window and thought about what it was that stared back at me.  It's a powerful and intimately relateable image to segway into the personal introspective thoughts of the poem, though it seems somewhat unrelated to the message apart from saying that Louise reminds himself of his father in the ways the poem describes.  It's a cold, grim notion to me, imagining willfully going through life with the intention of taking no pleasure in it so as not not miss it when it is lost, almost disturbing to the point of morbidity.  The fact that the author is reminded of these aspects of his father when looking at himself, particularly in reference to his relationship with his mother, does not speak in his favor, unless he somehow values the kind of zen budhist philosophy of transcending earthly attachments to achieve enlightenment, but there is no indication that that is the case.
I find the structure of the poem a bit hap-hazard if it exists at all.  It is more an artistically descriptive sentence about a life philosophy than a poem in many respects, and there seems to be little reason to the line splits.  Perhapse the poem was translated from a foreign language, given the umlaut in the author's last name, and the structure makes more sense in the original language.  Nonetheless, I find this poem very thought provoking.