Not About Knowledge, But To Live With Desire

Not About Knowledge, But To Live With Desire - Poem by William Bronk

The Ignorant Lust After Knowledge

BY WILLIAM BRONK (1918-1999)

I come in from the canal. I don’t know anything.

It is well and good to ask what we need to know

as if it were all, as if we didn’t need.

Well, I need. I may never know anything

but I need. One sees desire not

as something to satisfy but to live with.

A light, this side of the hill toward Argyle,

flowed like fog through the hollows, rose to the depth

of the hills, illumined me. I faded in it

as the world faded in me, dissolved in the light.

No one to know and nothing knowable.

Oh, we know that knowing is not our way;

But, the choice ours, would make it our way, would leave

the world for the same world made knowable.

- From To Praise The Music (1972)

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Not knowledge, but to live with desire

***

Michael Heller remarks in the New York Times Book Review, 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”

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