Goethe glimpsed his own ghost on horseback,
galloping toward him in a gray coat down a familiar road,
and Donne imploded when his wife’s spectre walked across the room
the night before her miscarriage.
Distinguished company, my identical twin!
And your best physicists would insist nothing’s amiss.
They’ve agreed I exist in their mathematical universe.
Your duplicate will stare you straight in the eye
If you travel the right distance.
Yes, I came all this way to see you, my stranger!
Where is my fanfare? Welcome me, please!
Should we embrace? Or should I try to kill you?
Were I Goldyadkin, I’d decry your mimicry!
So, he’d say, you’re a liar, striving after what’s rightfully mine.
That’s why you’re here. Perhaps, as in Rosetti’s How They Met Themselves,
we’ll always be pale, self-effacing strangers.
How to ignore folkloreβs foreboding dΓ©cor?
It must be unsettling to be threatened by identity,
surprised by precise likeness,
besieged by quintessential intimacy.
I know I am a bad omen. An entity. Shall I go
after solemnly promising to reappear three times,
to be your proper harbinger of death?
Better to dwell in the waters of Lethe,
to forget whatever severed us forever,
alter fate’s inscription: We were never meant to meet.
Yes, by all means, let’s unseal the ideal
and let perfect understanding preclude speech.
Or, better yet, my dear palindrome,
let’s share the full spectrum of secrets, the complete
fairytale, gaze at the fateful, at prismatic existence,
walk the halls and corridors of our mirror images,
hand in hand, unafraid.