The Oxford Dictionary defines a “doppelganger” as ‘An apparition or double of a living person’. There’s an interesting article on the BBC here
I also found this rather strange website where you can register your details and find your very own ‘twin stranger’.
I have my very own twin who I’m often mistaken for, so it’s not that I long for a doppelganger.
But I’ve been fascinated by them since I heard a story from a friend about visiting a concentration camp, looking at the pictures on the wall of the victims who were murdered, and seeing a photo of a student that my friend taught. My friend said it wasn’t a lookalike, it was his student, staring out from many years ago, from a horrific time in history.
And there are other names for doppelgangers – a ‘spirit double’, a ‘fetch’, a ‘firstcomer’.
So this is my doppelganger poem, my own private haunting, and one of the first poems I wrote in the sequence, examining an experience which led to me finally being forced to think about something I hadn’t thought about for ten years, something I hadn’t told anyone about for ten years, a ‘fetch’ that dragged me back to the past.
Encounter
It was you, the set of your shoulders, your way
of standing, your arms folded across your chest,your belly a small hill, it was you, it was you,
your hair dark and shaved, your skin brownfrom the sun. I turned on my heel and went
back into the classroom and sank to my kneesbehind the door and I prayed you away,
to a God I’d never spoken to before,I wished you away like a child. I looked again
and again through the darkened glass,it was you, but it was not you. Your soul
had entered this man, his eyes and his handswere yours, it was you, I could swear it
on anything you named, if I stopped lookingit would always be you. So I looked
and I looked till my eyes burned fromnot blinking and I watched him walk away.
Your soul left his body as if it hadnever been there and all that was left
of you was a taste of smoke in the air.
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