A room with a skinny bed, a window that gazes upon the grain of brick wall, a chair used as night stand to hold pint of bourbon.
RED ALARM CLOCK TEXT FULL
It is cut off, rather, bright, loud, full of hard things, a tangible place. It is a vivid, brief, alluring tease of a poem that does not drift off as would a conversation between two people fade as the couple walked further up the sidewalk from where you stood.
This is a perfect snippet of a longer conversation, the start of something that makes you lean closer for the juicier parts, the contrasting accounts of what was said and done and how both the narrator and the "you" remember each other's response. I want to sail down the Nile /At sunsetBefore I die, /"You said once, Cleopatra./The room, I recall,/Had a plank floor,/A narrow bed, and a window /Facing a brick wall,/Plus a chair where I kept /A pint of bourbon, /The coffee cup we used as an ashtray,/ And a red alarm clock.
Simic, here, has a poem, The Red Alarm Clock, I wish I'd written. We can each supply our own example of things a friend has said we wish we could claim as our original wit. Charles Simic's poems appeal to me for the same reason you might like a wisecrack someone makes as they recall an incident that turns into one of life's little lessons: whether lost car keys, spilled milk, or walking around a department store with you fly open, a terse, casual summary, vaguely self mocking, with an odd detail tossed in for texture, makes the phrase memorable.