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A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish.Charles Simic
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One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.Charles Simic
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Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.Charles Simic
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In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.Charles Simic
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Poetry is an orphan of silence.Charles Simic
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I love America, " he'd tell us. We were going to make a million dollars manufacturing objects we had seen in dreams that night.Charles Simic
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Like many others, I grew up in an age that preached liberty and built slave camps.Charles Simic
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The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.Charles Simic
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The idea is to spin the wheel of metaphors and images until sparks of associations begin to fly for the reader.Charles Simic
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Memory, all-night's bedside tattoo artist.Charles Simic
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The ProdigalDark morning rain Meant to fall On a prison and a schoolyard, Falling meanwhile On my mother and her old dog. How slow she shuffles now In my father’s Sunday shoes. The dog by her side Trembling with each step As he tries to keep up. I am on another corner waiting With my head shaved. My mind hops like a sparrow In the rain. I’m always watching and worrying about her. Everything is a magic ritual, A secret cinema, The way she appears in a window hours later To set the empty bowl And spoon on the table, And then exits So that the day may pass, And the night may fall Into the empty bowl, Empty room, empty house, While the rain keeps Knocking at the front door. .Charles Simic
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For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.Charles Simic
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Once I knew, then I forgot. It was as if I had fallen asleep in a field only to discover at waking that a grove of trees had grown up around me. “Doubt nothing, believe everything, ” was my friend’s idea of metaphysics, although his brother ran away with his wife. He still bought her a rose every day, sat in the empty house for the next twenty years talking to her about the weather. I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were my many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it! My friend’s empty house with every one of its windows lit. The dark trees multiplying all around it. .Charles Simic
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Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.Charles Simic
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Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.Charles Simic