Echo and Narcissus

Reading Norman Mailer on Picasso yesterday, his musing on the true nature of narcissism reminded me of this poem I wrote a couple of years ago.

Beyond the mirrored surfaces: the trees
tie the earth together with the sky,
their feet in clay. Their tortured arms upreach,
their torsos stretched to breaking by the strain.

Around the fringes, daffodils pretend
to pour narcissi onwards without end,

while on the water, blasted branches rain,
and seek the rippled sky, and try to teach,
as flustered clouds go rolling ever by,
that half the world's an echo on the breeze.

Roy