The dead man steps down from the scaffold. He holds his bloody head under his arm. The apple trees are in flower. He’s making his way to the village tavern with everybody watching. There, he takes a seat at one of the tables and orders two beers, one for him and one for his head. My mother wipes her hands on her apron and serves him. It’s so quiet in the world. One can hear the old river, which in its confusion sometimes forgets and flows backwards.
[The dead man steps down from the scaffold.]
Charles Simic
Feature Date
- July 17, 2023
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
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[The dead man steps down from the scaffold.] from The World Doesn’t End. 1990 © by Charles Simic. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.
Charles Simic was a Serbian-American poet and former co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn’t End, and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems, 1963–1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.
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