after David Hockney
There are two of you (you being singular, but in two forms). One of you is
in motion, swimming in marbled light; standing by the pool, one of you is not.
A vision of yourself, or a version, it’s unclear which, cuts through the water.
Perhaps it’s some of both, your likeness caught in a photographic emulsion
that drops to the floor like a shadow (but made of light) severed from its spring.
The figure slows as it bends the path you thought you were on, warm and cool,
a steaming apparition, a morning. The object in the mirror is closer than it appears.
Its arms move when yours stay still; its legs peel apart, electric, under the caress
of reflection, of dispersion. You propel yourself forward even as you stand in place.
Your arms break with a gleam, the dark flash of a blade husking the silk off the quiet
of yourself, moving closer to the figure standing by the pool, standing against the sun,
the way a vine grows new shoots from the same source, changing directions, turning.
