Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by Emily Pulfer-Terino

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror*

“...the portrait is
the reflection once removed...”
John Ashbery

“…it’s an artwork that’s more about 
creating a system than an object…”
Doug Aitken

How many times is it removed,
or grafted, my reflection? 
A mirror seems to show me
to myself, but just when looked
directly at, and just in certain
light.  From the french mirer,
which translates, roughly, “to see, to
contemplate”. Prior, from a Latin
variant mirari,  “to wonder at”,
mirror is noun and verb
at once, both the object and its use
to recognize, to marvel. 

Further afield, a mirror
is a window into seeing. My
seeing through a window                      
mirrors how I know the world.
From the early
Middle English, breath 
door, wind eye; note the emphasis
on movement through air,
on breathing. 

Early windows were only 
somewhat translucent, thin slices 
of marble, horn. A window would
not show forms to people inside
looking out, it would only show
a flow of dark and light. Later,
blown cylinders were sliced into
panes, transparent but rife with
​ripples from glass settling,
warping and distorting,
incorporating air in waves  and
seeming fissures. The windows
in our house were like this,
ancient. Most panes contained
what looked like small tornados
of trapped air. I’d fix my gaze
and see myself, a storm,
and through these see the world.

When it was rumoured that a
mirrored hot air balloon
was coming to our county, the first
 of its kind,  a live installation,
all our anticipation
eclipsed our disbelief. This was
before a tornado felled the
fairgrounds, shattering half our
town. There can be a sense of
before and after. With seeing
a storm of that magnitude.
With any real reckoning. 

We eyed posters and flyers,
googled the hot air balloon. In
these images, each cloud, each
tree, each blade of grass appeared
acute and magnified on that globed
surface that seemed more like
glass than glass, offering the world
back, floating, flown above. 

In eager online searches, 
we gleaned the artist’s early works
included sculptures 
of reflective words; and angular
underwater forms moored to 
the ocean floor, refracting light;
and a house made out of mirrors
so clear it seemed to disappear.
With photos so unbelievable,
yet so believable, how hard
to know which way was up,
or down, or through.

In The Wizard of Oz, a tornado
untethers the house from earth,
untethering Dorothy herself. Oz
is odd and technicolour, both
shadow and reflection of Dorothy’s
grayscale Kansas. For movie
viewers, too, the screen is a pane 
gazed through, suspending
disbelief, into the story.

Dorothy ran from bracing wind,
aiming for underground. We
poured into the open sunshine
in that outfield, racing to see.
The balloon was full of fire-fueled
air, enormous, dull as duct tape,
​blunt and corrugated too. Like
those windows made of horn or
marble, luminous, showing little.
Reflecting only light and land, sky
and a mass of earth-shaped earth. 

You can see it in the
selfies, friends and friends of
friends and so on, smiling and
documenting, wondering at their
very sense of wonder. Glad faces of
good people at good angles, the
balloon behind them, slightly
shining, great and gray. Beaming,
photographic proofs of having
been there then, when something
truly  happened. Each selfie is an
image of
a notion of a reckoning.
Art can dazzle and confound, 
and both again, endlessly.
Interfering magnets, mirrors facing
mirrors. I went up close
​to see the balloon, its flame and
seeming silvering, scrying for
an image of the world I lived in,
what I was. As a child, I’d found
Oz’s flying monkeys most startling.
Now, it’s how I cannot tell
the world from my idea
of the world. Removed, remoored,
mirrored, and seen through to, the
only thing to see is that I’m seeing.

Emily Pulfer-Terino

*The title of this poem is the title of a poem and collection by John Ashbery.

Emily Pulfer-Terino is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, The Collagist, The Southeast Review, Poetry Northwest, Stone Canoe, The Louisville Review, Juked, and other journals and anthologies. Her poetry chapbook, Stays the Heart, is published by Finishing Line Press. She has been a Tennessee Williams Poetry Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and has been granted a fellowship for creative nonfiction at the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, and she lives in Western Massachusetts.