Most poems about mirrors are about vanity or self-discovery. Balachandran V's poem is about avoidance. Its speaker, who has "seen me for / Half a century and more," has more or less stopped looking at his reflection, and he reports this in the tone of a small household habit. Only in the last few lines do we learn what he is avoiding: a question, put to him by his own face, about a life that seems to have got away from him.
The grammar of the title is the first clue. People normally say "I do not look at myself." This speaker says "I do not look at me," and the plainness is slightly jarring, as if the self were someone he must refer to like anybody else. The pattern continues in "I do not see me in the mirror" and "I know me well enough." He is already two people, the one who looks and the one looked at, so the final moment, when the reflection becomes "he," finishes a split that began in the first line. The poem also separates "look" from "see." He does not look, and when he does, he does not see a person, only parts: "bald pate," "fleshy, swarthy face," "yellowing teeth," "graying stubble." The participles "yellowing" and "graying" are unfinished, so the decay feels ongoing. The mirror has shrunk to a tool for jobs like brushing teeth and "the vexing necessity to shave," a stiff, almost bureaucratic phrase that makes shaving sound like paying a tax. The dry humour is part of the defence.
The form suits that mood. There is no rhyme scheme and no regular metre. The lines are short and uneven, often two to five words, and they fall like speech from someone thinking aloud. The repeated "I do not" has the drone of a man talking himself into indifference, and "mirror" comes back three times, as though he cannot quite leave it alone. Line breaks do small, quiet work. "Having seen me for" hangs on its preposition before the long span of "half a century" arrives, and "Slip away?" sits alone on the last line, so the words themselves seem to slip off the edge of the poem. There is no rhyme, but a vowel sound recurs: "days," "face," "shave," and finally "away." The last word echoes the earlier ones.
The turn comes with "But." The glimpse happens "When my eyes meet my eyes," a line built like a reflection, with the same phrase on either side of its verb. Then comes the harshest line, "Tired, watery, dead," three descriptions that grow heavier as they go. "Watery" might suggest age or tears, but "dead" cancels any tenderness. The reflection speaks "silently," so the accusation is clearly his own conscience and not an outside voice. And the question is not "what happened?" but "Why did you let life / Slip away?" The verb "let" makes him responsible, while "slip" suggests something gradual and unnoticed, as with soap or water through the fingers. No disaster is named. The loss seems to come from small, ordinary neglect.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It never says what the regret is: no lost love, no failed ambition. Every reader can supply their own. It also undermines its speaker. "I know me well enough" is the line of someone who doesn't want to be asked anything, and the poem's ending shows how false it is, because a man at peace with himself would not avoid his own eyes. The poem is signed with a place and date, "Trivandrum, 23.01.2009," which gives it the feel of a diary entry, a thought caught on a particular day. The question it ends on gets no reply, and the poem leaves the silence for the reader to sit in.