Charles Simic

“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’s 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’m 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.”

“Poetry is an orphan of silence.”

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

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

“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.”

“Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.”

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

“A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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