Charles Simic

Memory, all-night's bedside tattoo artist.

The idea is to spin the wheel of metaphors and images until sparks of associations begin to fly for the reader.

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish.

Like many others, I grew up in an age that preached liberty and built slave camps.

I love America," he'd tell us. We were going to make a million dollars manufacturing objects we had seen in dreams that night.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

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. __oubt nothing, believe everything,_ was my friend__ 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__ empty house with every one of its windows lit. The dark trees multiplying all around it.

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

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.

Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.

One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.

For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.

The ProdigalDark morning rainMeant to fallOn a prison and a schoolyard,Falling meanwhileOn my mother and her old dog.How slow she shuffles nowIn my father__ Sunday shoes.The dog by her sideTrembling with each stepAs he tries to keep up.I am on another corner waitingWith my head shaved.My mind hops like a sparrowIn the rain.I__ always watching and worrying about her.Everything is a magic ritual,A secret cinema,The way she appears in a window hours laterTo set the empty bowlAnd spoon on the table,And then exitsSo that the day may pass,And the night may fallInto the empty bowl,Empty room, empty house,While the rain keepsKnocking at the front door.