Simic’s “Night Picnic” defies picnic expectations. Instead of daylight, there is a very dark vast starless sky. Instead of romancing or jollity, a man and woman sit on the grass without communicating.
The narrator finds it slightly ironic that they should be drinking red wine and nibbling a crust like a mouse in such a situation. Wine and bread suggest communion and Simic’s ambivalence about the existence of God. The absence of light indicates the lack of love.
There was a sky, starless and vast–
Home of every one of our dark thoughts–
Its door open to more darkness.
And you, like a late door-to-door salesman,
With only your own beating heart
In the palm of your outstretched hand.
All things imbued with God’s being—
(She said in hushed tones
As if his ghost might overhear us)
The dark woods around us,
Our faces which we cannot see,
Even this bread we are eating.
You were mulling over particulars
Of your cosmic insignificance
Between slow sips of red wine.
In the ensuing quiet, you could hear
Her small sharp teeth chewing the crust–
And then finally, she moistened her lips.
See Charles Simic. Night Picnic: Poems. New York Harcourt, Inc., 2001