OK, I'm going to read two more poems.
I didn't write this poem for Charlie Simic,
but I somehow at a certain point, a few weeks ago,
I decided that it actually was for Charlie Simic.
I'm not sure it's about him, not in any biographical way.
There's something about it that makes me feel
in touch with Charlie's spirit.
It's called "Don't Doubt It."
Don't doubt it when the core samples prove how pleasing it
is to be woken by a baster's rain at dawn,
cool grass wet with the benign fattening of drops.
Sweet apparitional rubbish like Double Dutch sap
fallen from a maple tree.
Your tormentors are yet to be born or fell asleep
a millennium ago.
Your beauty is the beauty that does not
dispense with struggles.
It wears loafers the color of gun-metal a face
full of second thoughts, eyes you'd like to believe
are supernatural.
Aspiring to eyes of a color not found in nature
is very lace-curtain Irish.
And you too resemble one of Yates's twilight boys
strolling from counting house to pub after the Easter uprising.
But the purpose of your days is not simply to meet -cute,
it's to be changed.
We inherit a marshaling yard full of dark freight,
but the track switches work.
How much of whoever you are after all
is who you were when you were the stony theologian
of Westport Harbor?
Maybe in a quiet moment in the backyard
today you look at a spray of tea roses leafing out
and hear the rain inside them whenever the wind shakes them.
Don't let possibility go away in pain.