Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, July 20, 2008

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.

Who better than Simic to make our own wartime losses real? This poem is called "Driving Home," and it runs through me like a hard hammered nail:

Minister of our coming doom, preaching

On the car radio, how right

Your Hell and damnation sound to me

As I travel these small, bleak roads

Thinking of the mailman's son

The Army sent back in a sealed coffin.

His house is around the next turn.

A forlorn mutt sits in the yard

Waiting for someone to come home.

I can see the TV is on in the living room,

Canned laughter in the empty house

Like the sound of beer cans tied to a hearse.

That last image of beer cans tied to a hearse as if for a wedding is an apt simile for the horror of overhearing sitcom laughter in the fallen soldier's home. The particular tragedy evokes at the level of a whisper the raging grief that now afflicts the thousands who mourn fallen loved ones.

(Charles Simic's "Prodigy" is from "Selected Early Poems," George Braziller, 2000. "St. Thomas Aquinas" is from "The Book of Gods and Devils," Harcourt Brace, 1990. "Driving Home" is printed here with the poet's permission. Copyright Charles Simic.)

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."