Mimed

Barcelona was hot three summers ago, when I was there, but the mimes were out in force. It was morning when I found this one. He hadn't yet finished his face.

A few days ago, when I was thinking about beginning a new project—crafting a new voice, shaping a new promise—I returned to this image. How perfectly it captured my state of my mind. The grimace. The incompleteness. The checking of self against self in the mirror.

It doesn't matter how many books you have written, how many poems. The first words are the first words. An experiment. A tremble.