In the fierce peak of the day it’s quietly they wade With spread arms into the blue breakers rushing white And swim seemingly with no tension, the arms Curved, the head’s gestures circular and slow. They walk dripping back into the air Of nineteen-fifty-five smiling downward from the glare As if modestly, as they move…
The meander of my walking, and through it A sun that swings to go with me at each turn, And sweet fatigue that remains childlike because It works at nothing. Push aggressively enough at the stout weave Of what is, appearances we must take as Being what they seem, and you start to tear through,…
Among polite giraffes swaying their long necks innocent of their loveliness, among cavalier hippoes who yawn through the afternoon, among properly misbehaved monkeys flying from tree to tree, among the dogs and cats of this neighborhood perfectly at ease secure in their niches, I stumble: the half step in the great chain. If I seem…
They are like two houses Waiting for the same couple. They return late one night, Exhausted and hungry, Only to find their key Fits neither door and yet unlocks The darkness between them. They have mastered the art Of carefully taking each other apart, Of leaving themselves nothing but together, Of fitting piece after piece…
Having walked out in the storm and seen no end to it and nowhere to get to you watch the snow cover the ground cover itself cover everything that is not you it is a blinding fall from moment into moment the air sweeping away the air the cold turning your breath to stone no…
It was gray; the air was just cool; the sky hung above me like the inside of a skull. It was easy to walk down that street. Before I thought, I had entered the brain of all the strangers but it had relaxed, it was not like noon with differences glaring in the sun. I…
Charles Simic, whose most easily available collections of poems are Dismantling the Silence (Braziller, 1971) and Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk (Braziller, 1974), spoke on a Friday afternoon in March, 1975 with George Starbuck in a New Hampshire kitchen. Much of the conversation centered on another book, White, (New Rivers…
1. Our Inhaler At first I was suspicious, when in the heat of our getting into each other you would call for “Amy.” I wondered who it was you wanted, me or her. But when you kept coming back for both of us, I realized that losing you to her was also a way of…
A Letter to 102 Boulevard Haussmann Mon cher maître, could even you have mastered such dissemblance? Given your gift for luring the accidental and the inevitable to lie down together, what would you have done with these disparities—could you have parsed them into a semblance of sense? Mind, that phoenix, Kindles its…
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