BillyBlog's Favorite Poems, #3 ("The Garden of Earthly Delights" by Charles Simic)

Whoa. Bukowski #4? And now Charles Simic #3? What gives? You'll have to wait and see. Anyone want to guess who wrote my two favorite poems? Send me a comment....

Anyway, Simic has written better poems, but this one is my favorite. I still remember reading it in the Mary Norton Clapp Library at Occidental College in 1987, standing up, and saying, "Wow!"
This is from his awesomely-titled Return to a Place Lit By a Glass of Milk:

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Buck has a headache. Tony ate
a real hot pepper. Sylvia weighs
herself naked on the bathroom
scale. Gary owes $800 to the
Internal Revenue. Roger says
poetry is the manifacture of lightning rods.
Jose wants to punch his wife
in the mouth. Ted's afraid
of his own shadow. Ray talks
to his tomato plants. Paul
wants a job in the post office
selling stamps. Mary keeps
smiling at herself in the mirror.

And I,
I piss in the sink
with a feeling of
eternity.

I just love this poem.

And it was short and sweet to offset the Bukowski.

Previous Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month:

#4 - "we ain't got no money, honey, but we got rain" by Charles Bukowski
#5 - "Garbage" by A.R. Ammons
#6 - "Rock and Hawk" by Robinson Jeffers
#7 - "Nostalgia" by Billy Collins
#8 - "A Piece of the Storm" by Mark Strand
#9A - "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forché and
#9B - "may i feel said he" by e.e.cummings
#10 - "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" by Galway Kinnell
#11 - "Symposium" by Paul Muldoon
#12 - "Poem for the Class of..." by Max Eberts
#13 - "Boss of the Food" by Lois-Ann Yamanaka
#14 - "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath
#15 - "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
#16 - "Buddhist Barbie" by Denise Duhamel
#17 - "One Train May Hide Another" by Kenneth Koch
#18 - "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) by Frank O'Hara (with Audio)
#19 - "Crumbs" by Hal Sirowitz (Audio Added)
#20 - "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
#21 - "They Feed They Lion" by Philip Levine
#22 - "Looking at Kilauea" by Garret Hongo
#23 - "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell (Audio Added)
#24 - A Handful of Richard Brautigan
#25 - "A Buddha in the Woodpile" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#26 - "Separation" by W.S. Merwin
#27 - "The Flea" by John Donne
#28 - Poem Twenty from Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
#29 - "Magpie's Song" by Gary Snyder
#30 - "Eunoia" by Christian Bok