"Charon's Cosmology" by Charles Simic

Summary: An unnamed man has the job of disposing of corpses, and he loots their pockets before disposing of them.
Paraphrase: He only has a weak light to find his way, and he has many dead bodies to deal with. Told to take the bodies to one side, he may be confused because of the large amount of bodies on each side. This isn't really important though. The man will loot the dead bodies. He often finds food. Rarely he finds a mirror or a book. These things are not important to him, and he disposes of them in the quick, lifeless river.
Close Reading: "Swift and cold and deep"
This line is a series of adjectives. There is not an object in this line, therefore the object that these adjectives are describing must be in a previous line. In the second line of this stanza, the word 'which' seperates two clauses. Because of this, we can rule out any objects before 'which' as being the object modified by the final line. This leaves two possible objects that these adjectives describe: 'he' and 'the dark river'. Because 'he' is performing an action, 'throws', I believe that 'the dark river' is the object being modified. I don't feel that the adjectives 'swift', 'cold', and 'deep' would be used to describe how the man throws. However, these words seem to fit with 'the dark river'. Because of the fact that there are only two adjectives present prior to line 15, I believe that this description of the dark river bears some major significance. The first three stanzas of this poem describe a man performing his job. His job is to dispose of corpses. The first 14 lines simply describes what he does in plain, declarative phrases. No thorough descriptions of any nouns are made. This is why I feel the description of 'river' with the four words 'dark', 'swift', 'cold', and 'deep' has implicit meaning. Because the main motif of this poem is death, I feel that this description of the river is a metaphor for death. I say this because the adjectives 'dark', 'swift', 'cold' and 'deep' could also be used to describe death. Death is quick, leaves the dead in complete darkness and their body cold, and death has often be compared to deep sleep, which makes the advective 'deep' fit. This could be a stretch, because the final stanza does not discuss death, but instead is about the objects the man finds with the dead. In the first 14 lines, this poem presents death as an everyday thing by showing it through the eyes of the Charon. No abstract meaning of death is presented. In the final two lines, it uses the river as a symbol to describe how profound death is.