Me, myself, and I— now we’re mostly friends. But I can remember
a different time when I fought with one, hid from another’s shadow.
I’ve never sleep-walked, and I can’t imagine being my own
doppelgänger… Whose ghostly shadow lives in the shadows?
Once, at a writing retreat in a castle, the fire burned down in the grate.
Was it the cold and damp that woke me at dawn, or was it a sitting shadow?
Villagers told of a lady walking the ramparts at night. Heartsick
or homesick? Before she became a bride, she turned to shadow.
In Kurosawa’s famous film, a thief passes for the warlord who has died.
No one knows who plays flute music in the fields; eventually, all is shadow.
But what purchase this world still has over us— Mornings are green and lilac,
afternoons rouged with jewel hues; nights star-lit, though smudged with shadow.
In response to small stone (171).