So perhaps it was appropriate that I discovered Charles Simic while riding on a TriMet bus in Portland, Oregon.  Posted inside the bus, at approximately head-height, were several placards containing excerpts from different poets.  This public-transit program was called something like “Poetry In Motion.”  This is the excerpt by Simic that I read:

Lovers hold hands in never-opened novels.
The page with a recipe for cucumber soup is missing.
A dead man writes of his happy childhood on a farm,
Of riding in a balloon over Lake Erie.

This excerpt is from his poem, USED  BOOK  STORE – the titles of his poems are always all-caps – which is published in his collection entitled, My Noiseless Entourage.

          Soon afterward, I found myself on an Oregon beach, with a cigar, reading through My Noiseless Entourage.  I immediately realized that I had to read the book backwards; that is, from back to front, the last poem first, in the order exactly reversed from that which is published.  Simic’s style demanded this; and I think he would appreciate that I read his collections this way.

          Also I discovered that many times Simic uses the title as the first line of his poem.  Here are a few examples:

OUR  OLD   NEIGHBOR

Who hasn’t been seen in his yard
Or sitting on his front porch
For what seems like forever, …

HE  HEARD WITH  HIS  DEAD  EAR

Your prayer.  The one you offered
On behalf of someone ailing.

SWEETEST

Little candy in death’s candy shop,
I gave your sugar a lick
When no one was looking,
Took you for a ride on my tongue
To all the secret places, …

All of the above are from My Noiseless Entourage, yet his prose poems don’t have titles at all in his collection entitled The World Doesn’t End (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990).  Instead, each prose poem is listed in the Table of Contents by the words of its first line.

And so to Charles Simic I dedicate the following, which was inspired by him.  I composed it on that dark night near the Canadian border after I had been entranced by his verse and followed him into some of his shadows and unlit corners.

MOURNING

A carpenter, handyman, craftsman

Now fifty years old

Toils in his solitary workshop

With hand-tools beside a house

          he may inherit someday.

Or drives his van to a grand house

          where he labors,

And then at night retires to

          his own apartment

          and his spouse.

But how do they occupy

          their evenings together?

It is better to get up in the morning

          and go to work again

Five and a half days every week.

                     Lee Cuesta

Be sure to check out my blog at www.leecuestalive.com.
Also this link:
http://www.ehow.com/how_4750375_compose-unforgettable-poem-valentine.html