Nobody in this poem looks into a pool. That is the first surprise of "Narcissus." The myth's youth wastes away gazing at his reflection, but Balachandran V's speaker keeps his eyes shut from start to finish. He lies on his back while masseurs work warm oil into his skin, and everything he learns about himself comes first through touch, then through imagination. The title promises vanity. The poem delivers something gentler and odder: a man making peace with the body he has lived in.
The opening stanzas are almost clinical in their sense of order. The speaker follows the masseurs' arms "mentally," and the poem follows their route: "From the sole of my feet, up / Through the ankles, calves, knees / And thighs." The list and the enjambed "up / Through" move the way hands do, steadily upward. The loincloth and the "pouch / Filled with medicinal leaves soaked in starchy fluid" suggest a traditional herbal treatment, though the poem never names it. What it does name, with disarming bluntness, is the body's reaction, or lack of one: "I wonder if I might get an erection; / I don't." That short clause, left alone, is funny and honest. The speaker refuses both embarrassment and showing off.
The imagery then grows more physical and less flattering. The starch draws "gluey patterns," the buttocks are "rounded like melons," and a painful lump is squeezed until he "squirm[s] and groan[s], in pain and pleasure." Next comes the hinge of the poem. Lying "like a slab of meat, fresh from the butcher," he imagines "Watching me from above." The butcher simile could be grim, with the body reduced to dead matter. But "Eyes closed" returns, three times in all, and the image becomes a thought experiment. By stepping outside himself, he can see his body as a separate thing, a "hunk of flesh," and discover how much he cares for it.
At that point the rhythm changes. The calm, observing lines give way to exclamations: "For so many years!" "The day I was born!" "This living, breathing being that is me!" The grammar buckles too. "That has been me, that'll me" is a broken, half-formed phrase, and the poem's own wording makes it seem as if the verb "to be" is being stretched into the future because ordinary tenses cannot hold a lifelong companionship. The body becomes a partner: "We have been together," "no secrets between us," and the penis is affectionately "him." The pairing "pleasure, pain we suffered together" reverses the earlier "pain and pleasure." A moment on the massage table has widened into a summary of a whole life.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular metre. It relies on the loose rhythm of speech, which suits its confessional tone. The stanzas swell to seven lines in the middle, then contract to four, four, three, and finally a single line. The shrinking feels like settling, as if the speaker's restlessness drains away. The last line, "I look at myself with great kindness...", trails off in an ellipsis, so the looking seems to continue beyond the page.
The poem matters because it reverses the myth it borrows. Narcissus loves an image and cannot leave it. This speaker loves a body with "shortcomings," scars, wrinkles and a hairy, broad chest, and he accepts all of it. His self-love is acceptance rather than admiration, and he reaches it through touch, memory and closed eyes rather than a mirror. The frankness is what gives the poem its force. It speaks of the male body, in all its bulk and history, without mockery or bravado, and it ends with kindness, a quieter word than pride.