Mr. X
By the time you’re forty, you’ve met so many people
their features fit together as little bits
from other people, like the Identi-Kits
that victims piece together with the police.
The felon is memory, which takes a face
and slices up what once was very simple.
People you loved, the waiter you saw every week
without seeing, arresting strangers re-assemble
years later in other faces and belong
convincingly there, as if they were unique,
and innocent of how they make you tremble
with remembering or forgetting. I was wrong,
Mr. X—you whose cheekbones I recall
from somewhere, and that funny, slightly cross-
eyed, quizzical look you shot me on the single
occasion we met—to assume you must have lost
someone who looked like me. And yet I stared
longingly at you, as you disappeared.
— Mary Jo Salter
from A Kiss in Space, Alfred A Knopf, 1999
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Author: The Best American Poetry
