The World Doesn’t End
Everything's forseeable. Everything has already been foreseen. What has been fated cannot be avoided. Even this boiled potato. This fork. This chunk of dark bread. This thought too.... My grandmother sweeping the sidewalk knows that. She says there's no god, only an eye here and there that sees clearly. The neighbors are too busy watching TV to burn her as a witch.
This poem is one of the untitled sections from The World Doesn’t End (Ecco, 1989)
More Simic truisms--of whjich there have been hundreds
The poem's first line is a howling untruth.