A Poem for a Thursday #206

William Bronk was born in Fort Edward, New York in 1918 and died in Hudson Falls, New York in 1999. He won the American Book Award in 1982 for Life Supports. He has been called “one of the best, if uncelebrated, of America’s poets.” Bronk served in the army during World War II, taught English at Union College in New York, and managed Bronk Coal and Lumber Company after his father’s death. He said that his poetry was composed in his head as he went about his day and then put on paper when he felt it was complete. He rarely edited his poems once they were written down. Michael Heller said, in the New York Times Book Review, that Bronk’s poetry “offers another way of looking at our common humanity, not in some imagined concurrence of shared knowledge, but in our need to construct and reconstruct worlds, in our attempts to appease a common metaphysical hunger.”

Excuse me, I thought for a moment you were someone I know.
It happens to me. One time at The Circle in the Square 
when it was still in the Square, I turned my head
when the lights went up and saw me there with a girl
and another couple. Out in the lobby, I looked
right at him and he looked away. I was no one he knew.
Well, it takes two, as they say, and I don't know what
it would prove anyway. Do we know who we are,
do you think? Kids seem to know. One time I asked
a little girl. She said she'd been sick. She said
she'd looked different and felt different. I said,
"Maybe it wasn't you. How do you know?"
"Oh, it was me," she said, "I know I was."

That part doesn't bother me anymore
or not the way it did. I'm nobody else
and nobody anyway. It's all the rest
I don't know. I don't know anything.
It hit me. I thought it was Harry when I saw you
and thought, "I'll ask Harry." I don't suppose
he knows, though. It's not that I get confused.
I don't mean that. If someone appeared and said,
"Ask me questions," I wouldn't know where to start.
I don't have questions even. It's the way I fade
as though I were someone's snapshot left in the light.
And the background fades the way it might if we woke 
in the wrong twilight and things got dim and grey
while we waited for them to sharpen. Less and less
is real. No fixed point. Questions fix
a point, as answers do. Things move again
and the only place to move is away. It was wrong:
questions and answers are what to be without 
and all we learn is how sound our ignorance is.
That's what I wanted to talk to Harry about.
You looked like him. Thank you anyway.

I Thought It Was Harry
William Bronk