I’m reading my way through “Voice at 3:00 am,” a collection of poems by Charles Simic (1938-2023), the fifteenth United States Poet Laureate. The collection was given to me by an American friend. (What better present can there be than a collection of poetry?) Simic’s poems have been called “tightly constructed Chinese puzzle boxes,” and many of them jump from image to seemingly unrelated image. I wondered if he might be called a surrealist. It’s taken me a while to adjust to his unique style, but I’m now beginning to greatly enjoy the poems, reading each one twice, as with all poems except those by Paul Durcan and Charles Bukowski, and finding new connections

Cabbage is one of Simic’s shortest and most direct poems. There are no great jumps or swerves. The image of cabbage symbolising mysterious love is amusing, ridiculous, and heart-warming. For me it symbolises not mysterious love but everyday, doing-the-washing-up-together love, perhaps the best kind of love—and perhaps, now I reflect, the most mysterious. Whatever kind of love cabbage symbolises, the “she” is not impressed and with the dramatic end to the poem “cut[s] the cabbage in two/With a single stroke of her knife.”

Cabbage by Charles Simic

She was about to chop the head
In half,
But I made her reconsider
By telling her:
“Cabbage symbolizes mysterious love.”

Or so said one Charles Fourier,
Who said many other strange and wonderful things,
So that people called him mad behind his back,

Whereupon I kissed the back of her neck,
Ever so gently,

Whereupon she cut the cabbage in two
With a single stroke of her knife.