"My Father Photographed with Friends" by William Bronk

Historic Hudson Falls, New York State Archives

This is my father photographed with friends, when he was young

Unsettled on the steps of a wooden porch, and the one

who lived there elegant beside him. They and the others

hopefully casual in the face of the deciding camera,

the judgments of which are unfeeling but can be swayed.

And I, as in some later picture of myself, 

look for a person identified beyond doubt, and knowing that he

is none of the others that he is not, yet still unsure,

under the features composed and trusting, who is there.

As if the decision were long and legal when handed down,

hard to be read and truly rendered in a such a case.

And hard, in the face, to find our usual pitiful ends.

God sweeten the bitter judgements of our lives. We wish so much.

[From Life Supports, 1976]

"Metonymy as an Approach to the Real World" by William Bronk

                                          "Night Windows" by Edward Hopper

Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
--which what?--something of what we sense
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance
of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words
that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place,
not thinking that this is the real world.

Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;
conceded, that "here" is anywhere we bound
and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in
from say, the sea, a purity of space.

[From The World, The Worldless (1964)]