Our autumn nights have been a mix this year, swinging between muggy and thick and crisp and cool, between visiting friends and social gatherings and quiet solitary evenings with the amiable large animal vet of our PBS streaming service. Maybe yours have been similar?
Something draws me to this poem by the late Charles Simic, and it’s not just the real and proverbial dark that lies ahead this time of year. It’s the longing for connection at the heart of the poem—and at the heart of most of us—in its eight short lines.
In his poetry Substack, Ordinary Plots, Devin Kelly explores Simic’s poem, alongside poems by Jack Gilbert, Fanny Howe, and others. He writes, “Simic’s poem captures and almost radically empathic approach to one’s own loneliness, which requires seeing the experience of such loneliness in just about anything.” Perhaps this sense of loneliness as something both individual and shared makes this a poem to return to.
“Stay with me,
As I push further and further
Into the dark.”
