If you find yourself
on workday mornings
staring into a mirror
and wondering about 
how a certain line
above your brows got there
after all the years it spent
on your mother’s face,

or about how the upward twist 
of your wry mouth’s left corner
migrated there from 
your dad’s Army photo,

or in general worrying
about this new slight slope
in your jowls,
so reminiscent now
of Uncle John, or how
the light you once saw
in your skin is now 
nowhere to be found,
dimming the essential
“you-ness” you have always known

into a simple, generic mask
of a darkening, dimming old man
getting older and dimmer 
in exactly the same way 
all the old ones in your family
darkened and dimmed,
take heart in knowing

that no matter how unfamiliar
you may seem to yourself,
how much you stray from
what you once thought
you immutably were, to those
on this side of the mirror
you will remain the same
mess we have always known
and loved and laughed at
since the first time
you stared in rapture
at your own face, not knowing
that we were in here all along,
staring back,

waiting for you to notice.