"Poems tell you

what you know already,"
wrote playwright Alan Bennett about poet Philip Larkin.

I think that if they tell you anything,
they tell you what you half-know already.
Otherwise reading them would not be worth the effort.

* * *

Charles Simic

COUNTRY FAIR

for Hayden Carruth

If you didn't see the six-legged dog,

It doesn't matter.

We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.

As for the extra legs,

One got used to them quickly

And thought of other things.

Like, what a cold, dark night

To be out at the fair.

Then the keeper threw a stick

And the dog went after it

On four legs, the other two flapping behind,

Which made one girl shriek with laughter.

She was drunk and so was the man

Who kept kissing her neck.

The dog got the stick and looked back at us.

And that was the whole show.