This article examines Iulian Filip’s poetry between Arcadism and depoetization. He is a representative of the Bessarabian generation of the 70s. There are analyzed obvious metamorphoses, metaphors and symbols which reconstruct the initiative journey of the poetic ego, the structure of poetic system in its fundamental antinomies. The author insists upon the relevant individual symbols. Among them he distinguishes between the mirror, the flight, black coffee or the broken clock, all of them are like „shards of reflection”. They reconstruct, through an „ars combinatoria”, a „magic mirror” of a destiny of a man who „flies / walks” for over forty years.