1. Imagine this:

Love After Love

by Derek Wolcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

2. What do you do with your image once you peel it from the mirror?

3. Try this: layer it right on top of you.

4. How’s it feel?

5. There may be a tiny molecule-level gap remaining between you and your mirror image, in which case, you can still see yourself — looking out from inside your body and evenly back. But only you can see yourself. It’s a private happiness. And you’re looking from so close that each cell is looking straight out at itself. Your left knee is looking at itself, and itself is looking back at it, and so on. Sit. Wander all through yourself doing this.

Bon appetit.

(PS — What do you normally imagine happening with the mirror image when you read this poem?! So many options…)