A simple and elegant poem by Simic:
Butcher Shop
Sometimes walking late at night
I stop before a closed butcher shop.
There is a single light in the store
Like the light in which the convict digs his tunnel.
An apron hangs on the hook:
The blood on it smeared into a map
Of the great continents of blood,
The great rivers and oceans of blood.
There are knives that glitter like altars
In a dark church
Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile
To be healed.
There is a wooden block where bones are broken,
Scraped clean– a river dried to its bed
Where I am fed,
Where deep in the night I hear a voice.
Charles Simic
What is it made of? Three things: matter-of-fact, realistic details; explicitly identified imagery; statements which escape being quite either of these things (or rhetoric, as well).
Sometimes walking late at night
I stop before a closed butcher shop.
There is a single light in the store
(plain realism)
Like the light in which the convict digs his tunnel.
(carefully-identified imagery…including even the "like" most MFA's are taught to avoid)
An apron hangs on the hook:
The blood on it smeared…
(plain-air detail)
…into a map
Of the great continents of blood,
The great rivers and oceans of blood.
(another explicit - and fairly banal - image, but masquerading as an existential predicate in the current MFA-approved style)
There are knives that glitter…
(realism)
…like altars
In a dark church
Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile
To be healed.
("like" again…Shame on you, Charles!)
There is a wooden block where bones are broken,
Scraped clean…
(realistic detail BTW "scraped clean" refers to the condition of the butcher's block, cleaned before closing time)
– a river dried to its bed
(another explicit image, with the coy existential phrasing)
But this?
Where I am fed,
Where deep in the night I hear a voice.
Four strategies:
Realism –
Where I am fed in the Deli by daylight,
Where deep in the night I hear the voices
of cattle in the Stock-Yards.
(Maybe William Carlos Williams would have preferred this.)
Something like Imagery –
Where I am fed by the ghosts of cattle
Where deep in the night I hear their voices.
Rhetoric –
Where I am fed, with all the carnivores,
When the butcher shop opens to daylight.
Or Mystery –
Where I am fed,
Where deep in the night I hear a voice.
…which necessarily comes at the price of a certain opacity, but also permits additional possibilities.
This last is not ALL of poetry (and the other approaches could be made more powerful than my lame examples) but it has its place.
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