Self Portrait, as in Divisible

Passing a book on Feng Shui in the mirrored hallway

I instead open another on the paintings of Botero

where the purity of deformed spheres seems

to both mock and praise reality’s

obesity, while attempting to stir

an argument on the multiplicities

of life: that we are only alike as

the likeness of some original.

Ocelot, my cat,

is a woolsucker. His large yellow-chipped green eyes

slandering, splintering, muscles contracting orgasmically

as he grips the riverrock-colored afghan

and draws out the empty milk of a memory, and is fed by it.

He has learned this from no one.

He folds up and sleeps in the opulence of brain.

Is he an occurrence of form

or its ghost? Seeming both the pattern

and the thing itself, he is even more

than that, being also an idea, which survives

within me, snatched however briefly from extinction.

This is how we are changed and made new.

We are the idea of ourselves driven into being.

Our bodies fit to form as we create the patterns.

All mirrors are wrong. There is no such thing as imitation.