The Brocken Spectre 2, or A Poem for Billo, who is still away

Against Biography

by William Bronk

We came to where the trees, if there were trees,

say, a little group of them, or a house
maybe, something there, whatever it was,

a man standing, someone, it would be clear

enough, sharp at the edges but everything else

was blurred, all running together or else

moving - sideways, back and forth- or the scale

was wrong, some of the things close by

were smaller than those set further back, so that though

we saw something, and saw it plain enough

we saw it nowhere, there wasn't any place

for it to be, or any place for us.

We wandered. Not quite aimless. Man here, though,

would live without biography: it needs

a time and place: there isn't any: who

could say, not smiling, me and my world

or so and so and his time, and stage a play

clothed properly in front of sets,

and believe that this made time and place of the world?

No, we have come too far for that belief

and saw ourselves as ghost against the real,

and time and place as ghosts; there is the real.

It is there. Where we are: nowhere. It is there.