William Bibby

  THE MEZZANINE BATH

  

  My aunt had a bathroom where I learnt physics;

  it delayed light, photons drifted backwards

  toward their entities.

  

  Natural laws became intoxications,

  opportunities, their variable escapes,

  my mind evolved

  

  images of self, images of illusion.

  The room was lined with opposing mirrors

  for the vanity

  

  this Knightsbridge town house demanded

  in the tarnished evening light each

  silken reflection

  

  reflected each, a soul embodied with a face

  swept wave upon curving wave into

  limitlessness

  

  with an almost symphonic media’d thread

  transiting between the sheeted mirrors;

  a vesperal science.

  

  I learnt there Einstein and Gravity,

  how they love light so much, its clinging

  love’s curving breath

  

  like a disturbance of a moths wing

  gently persuading a universe to bend

  to the infinite

  

  while I would lie in the bath imagining

  a path to another world running along

  the shore of an ocean.