Q: Have you noticed all these new nonfiction books on "happiness"? It's an industry.
Charles Simic: It's really frightening. People need to read a book on how to be happy? It's completely an American thing. Can you imagine people in Naples sitting on a bus or in a trattoria reading a book about happiness?
Q: What advice would you give to people who are looking to be happy?
Simic: For starters, learn how to cook.
--Interviewed by Deborah Solomon in the New York TImes
Eyes Fastened With Pins
by Charles Simic
How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death's laundry.
The beautiful daughters
Setting death's supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address somehow wrong,
Even death can't figure it out
Among all the locked doors...
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death's side of the bed.
From Charon's Cosmology, by Charles Simic. Braziller Series of Poetry, © 1977.
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