I Thought It Was Harry, By WILLIAM BRONK

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 didn’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.

From “American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders” edited by Eliot Weinberger. (Marsilio: $40; 434 pp.). This is a rather tame selection from an anthology that gathers the non-academic, avant-garde and anti-traditional poets like Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and H.D.; poets from such schools and movements as the Objectivists, the Beats, Black Mountain, the New York School and ethnopoetics. The book includes complete biographies for each of the 35 poets included. 1993 by Eliot Weinberger. Reprinted by permission.