Poet's Choice

I once heard Charles Simic, who finished his term as the nation's poet laureate this month, tell a story about his mother in the war-ravaged Yugoslavia of his youth. Bartering with a gold-toothed gypsy, she swapped his father's tuxedo for a suckling pig they ate on Christmas. The anecdote embodies for me Simic's genius: juxtaposition. Not the easy surrealism of two random things (fish and bicycle, say), but the binding together of Manichaean opposites: tuxedo and pig. As an emigré, he also blends an American's confidence in the future with an Eastern European's wary knowledge of the past. In "St. Thomas Aquinas," he starts by binding philosophy to day labor in a poem whose logic is a mockery of logic:

Since "man naturally desires happiness"

According to St. Thomas Aquinas,

Who gave irrefutable proof of God's existence and purpose,

I loaded trucks in the Garment Center.

Me and a black man stole a woman's red dress.

It was of silk; it shimmered.

Upon a gloomy night with all our loving ardors on fire,

We carried it down the long empty avenue,

Each holding one sleeve. . . .

The men are black and white, joined by the sleeves of a flaming red dress -- their love and desire nobly enacted through petty theft.

This talent for melding opposites also makes Simic the perfect poet for a country engaged in a bloody war. In "Prodigy," he describes himself as a boy who grows up "bent over a chessboard," instructed in that war game in a house near a Roman graveyard in 1944.