Position without a Magnitude by Charles Simic
Position without a Magnitude
Charles SimicAs when someone
You haven’t noticed before
Gets up in an empty theater
And projects his shadow
Among the fabulous horsemen
On the screenAnd you shudder
As you realize it’s only you
On your way
To the blinding sunlight
Of the street.
MARGINALIA
Hot fuck. Just got a C+ on my oral exams in Philosophy. Someone I shouldn’t name’s birthday in exactly a month from now. Watched a movie. Felt sad because the characters can’t go back. Or was I feeling really sad for myself? Had no plans at all to come back to school. M. went and saved me. I feel hollow inside.
ABOUT CHARLES SIMIC
Charles Simic is widely recognized as one of the most visceral and unique poets writing today. His work has won numerous awards, among them the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the appointment as US poet laureate. Simic’s first poems were published in 1959, when he was 21. His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published in 1967. His book of prose poems, The… (more)
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ENDNOTES
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Peter C. L.
Simic contrasts the shadow of the lone viewer with the brilliant horsemen on the screen. The movie patron, lost in the dream world and grandiosity of the dream above, awakens with the realization of his own dismal insignificance and the ultimate
dream-crushing, blinding reality that awaits.