Mi séquito silencioso

My Noiseless Entourage is haunted by marooned, wordless individuals, but also by a sense of indecipherable, constant chatter, the murmuring on the other side of the wall. Charles Simic illuminates the slow, distracted quality of rural life, and the paranoia, the suspicions of city-dwellers. An old man sitting in his backyard with a rope in his hand. A flock of spooked starlings that seem to have heard something no one else has. The lodger no one has ever seen, drawing her bath upstairs. The poet as a dog, growling at something out there he cannot bring himself to name.