From Walking the Black Cat, 1996

I have been reading a lot of about Charles Simic lately. He will be playing a starring role in my thesis if and when that ever gets completed. Simic, born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia immigrated to the United States in 1954. He's won numerous awards, most notably the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for The World Doesn't End in 1990. His poetry is influenced by philosophers such as Hegel, Breton, Nietche and especially Heidegger. in his essay, "Negative Capability and Its Children" Simic decrisbes the influence of these philosophers on contemporary poets thusly: "Their poetics have to do with the nature of perception, with being, with psyche, with time and consciousness. Not to subject oneself to their dialetics and uncertainties is truly not to experience the age we have inherited." ("Charles Simic and Mark Strand: The Presense of Absence" by Richard Jackson) Fascinating the way the theories of an individual can eventually make their way into to the collective unconscious and that the spaces they hold can eventually evolve into new ideas, which in turn spread into new spaces.

But enough of philosophy. I really chose the poem Blood Orange because I liked the idea and can relate, at least today to the feeling that, "Everything is teetering on the edge of everything/ With a polite smile."

Blood Orange

By Charles Simic

It looks so dark the end of the world may be near.

I believe it's going to rain.

The birds in the park are silent.

Nothing is what it seems to be,

Nor are we.

There's a tree on our street so big

We can all hide in its leaves.

We won't need any clothes either.

I feel as old as a cockroach, you said.

In my head, I'm a passenger on a ghost ship.

Not even a sigh outdoors now,

If a child was left on our doorstep,

It must be asleep.

Everything is teetering on the edge of everything

With a polite smile.

It's because there are things in this world

That just can't be helped, you said.

Right then, I heard the blood orange

Roll off the table and with a thud

Lie cracked open on the floor.