simics stones

yesterday i went to the longfellow house in cambridge to hear charles simic read. it was held at a 250 year old historic house that usually costs money to see, but for this event it was free to get in, free to walk around, free to sit down in the garden in the sun and watch simic as he stood in the shade of a crab apple tree reading his wonderfully obscure poems laced with his dry yugoslavian accent... hes the former US poet laureate and a pulitzer prize winner... and it was me, my patient companion, and maybe 35 other 75+ year old audience members.
seriously, boston? home of 34857348092 colleges with writing programs? thats all you can muster for simic? i feel like my mom chastizing our generation for their interest, or lack of interests... but ugh.
anyway.
one thing i noticed was how often certain objects, specifically pearls, crows and stones, reoccured in his work. i love that about a reading; you start to understand a poets aesthetic, the way the landscape of their mind looks, the memories that were so powerful in their own lives that they became etched on their eyeballs, forever projected onto their field of vision.

the stones really got to me. im starting my bosses wedding poem now and thinking a lot about sparks flying, what it takes for that to happen between something as simple and seemingly energyless as a stone.
anyway here's an excerpt i love from a piece of his:

The stone is a mirror which works poorly. Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who’s to say? In the hush your heart sounds like a black cricket.

and a poem he read yesterday:

Stone

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.