A couple weeks old, but always fresh: the poet Charles Simic writes on the NYR’s blog about the language that sticks, both on and off the page. Simic has a lot of dark poems but the occasional blogs he writes for the New York Review of Books tend to be surprisingly whimsical.

“His wife looks like a stork,” I overheard someone say in a restaurant and my imagination swallowed the bait. She’s tall, long-legged, wears short skirts, holds her head high, and has a long thin nose, I said to myself. And that was just the beginning. The day after I heard a wife being compared to a stork, I saw her standing on one leg on top of a brick chimney and then a bit later perched on a gravestone in a small graveyard.

And if that wets your appetite, here’s a good poem by Simic for a Wednesday.