"This swift darkness is spring's first hour"
Simic, Williams, Brock-Broido, Wright, Holiday
Charles Simic:
William Carlos Williams:
Lucie Brock-Broido:
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Jay Wright:
Billie Holiday, “Solitude,” rec. May 9, 1941:
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Who better than Simic to make me stop swiping at them for a minute and look at the line of ants marching out of a crack in my formica as a solemn congregation, Quakers no less, gathering with me in the kitchen? But I also wanted to share this finding: I wanted to find the book this poem is in, so I googled it, and found another Simic poem also titled "Solitude", very different from the ant one, but also lovely, published in the Virginia Quarterly Review:
Solitude
By Charles Simic
ISSUE: Spring 2008
The only home you ever had.
No bigger than a matchbox—
Or else as vast as the sky full of stars—
With you as the sole tenant
Grateful for a fleabite to scratch
As you sit recalling the night
Someone knocked on your door.
You were afraid to open, but when you did,
There she was asking to borrow a candle.
You told her you didn’t have one.
The two of you stood face-to-face
Between two dark apartments
Unable to think of anything to say
Before turning your backs on each other.
Charles Simic
Charles Simic, the current US Poet Laureate, received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for The World Doesn’t End (Harcourt). His collection The Voice at 3:00 A.M. was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Award. His latest collection is My Noiseless Entourage (Harcourt, 2005).
ISSUE: Spring 2008 Volume 84 # 2
Love these. I like the overall idea of “as we are wounded in relationships, we are healed in them,” so I appreciate a focus on the healing part.