Untitled by Charles Simic
Untitled
Charles SimicThe stone is a mirror which works poorly.
Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dim-
ness, who’s to say? In the hush your heart sounds
like a black cricket.
SELECTED BY ELLA FREARS
This poem has stayed with me since I read it. There’s a lot of room in it – a lot that isn’t said.
I love the idea of a stone as a mirror that works poorly. When I’m alone sometimes I think of the lines ‘your dimness or its dimness, who’s to say?’ It feels intimate in an unsettling but gentle way – like Simic is whispering to us.
I can’t explain why I find it quite so affecting – but that’s the magic isn’t it.
ABOUT ELLA FREARS
Ella Frears is a poet and artist based in London. Her debut collection, Shine, Darling, (Offord Road Books, 2020) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Goodlord, (Rough Trade Books, 2024) her new hybrid work which takes the form of one long email to an estate agent, is shortlisted for the Forward Prize and the Sky Arts Awards’ Times Breakthrough Artist of the Year. She is currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow for the Courtauld Institute of Art, and hosts chat and music show Tears for Frears on Soho Radio.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in The World Doesn't End by Charles Simic, published by Ecco, 1989. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“You never know what Charles Simic is up to until you reach the end of the line or the bottom of the paragraph. Waiting for you might be a kiss. Or a bludgeon. A smile at the absurdities of society, or a wistful, grim memory of World War II.
He puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity.
Charles Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets us see through them.” (Source)
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)
Read more poems by Charles Simic • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
- This is Day 26 of Poems We Carry, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry—a living archive I’ve nurtured for two decades. For this milestone series, I invited writers I deeply admire to share poems that have meant something to them over time.
- Explore other works in pursuit of: silence • reflection • mystery • Or browse the index
- If this work resonates with you, please consider supporting the archive. Thank you for reading.
