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New and Selected Poems

Page 7

by Charles Simic


  Verging on the dark,

  About that day’s tragedies

  Which supposedly are not

  Tragedies in the absence of

  Figures endowed with

  Classic nobility of soul.

  Early Evening Algebra

  The madwoman went marking X’s

  With a piece of school chalk

  On the backs of unsuspecting

  Hand-holding, homebound couples.

  It was winter. It was dark already.

  One could not see her face

  Bundled up as she was and furtive.

  She went as if windswept, as if crow-winged.

  The chalk must have been given to her by a child.

  One kept looking for him in the crowd,

  Expecting him to be very pale, very serious,

  Carrying a book or two in his hand.

  Ever So Tragic

  Heart—as in Latin pop songs

  Blaring from the pool hall radio.

  The air had thickened, the evening air.

  He took off his white shirt.

  The heart, one could mark it

  With lipstick on a bare chest,

  The way firing-squad commanders mark it.

  He was reading in the papers

  About the artificial heart.

  The same plastic they use for wind-up toys,

  She thought. More likely

  Like an old wheelbarrow to push:

  Heart of stone, knife grinder’s

  Stone . . .

  Later

  It was raining and they got into bed.

  O desire, O futile hope, O sighs!

  In coal miner’s pit and lantern:

  The heart, the bright red heart . . .

  Didn’t the blind man just call

  His little dog that?

  Hearts make haste, hasten on!

  For the Sake of Amelia

  Tending a cliff-hanging Grand Hotel

  In a country ravaged by civil war.

  My heart as its only bellhop.

  My brain as its Chinese cook.

  It’s a rundown seaside place

  With a row of gutted limousines out front,

  Monkeys and fighting cocks in the great ballroom,

  Potted palm trees grown wild to the ceilings.

  Amelia surrounded by her beaus and fortunetellers,

  Painting her eyelashes and lips blue

  In the hour of dusk with the open sea beyond,

  The long empty beaches, the tide’s shimmer . . .

  She pleading with me to check the ledgers,

  Find out if Lenin stayed here once,

  Buster Keaton, Nathaniel Hawthorne,

  St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote on love?

  A hotel in which one tangos to a silence

  Dark as cypresses in silent films . . .

  In which children confide to imaginary friends . . .

  In which pages of an important letter are flying . . .

  But now a buzz from the suite with mirrors.

  Amelia in the nude, black cotton over her eyes.

  It seems there’s a fly

  Pestering her lover’s Roman nose.

  Night of distant guns, muffled and comfortable.

  I am running with a flyswatter on a silver tray

  Strewn with Turkish delights

  And the Mask of Tragedy to cover her pubic hair.

  At the Night Court

  You’ve combed yourself carefully,

  Your Honor, with a small fine-tooth comb

  You then cleverly concealed

  Before making your entrance

  In the splendor of your black robes.

  The comb tucked inside a handkerchief

  Scented with the extract of dead roses—

  While you took your high seat

  Sternly eyeing each of the accused

  In the hush of the empty courtroom.

  The dark curly hairs in the comb

  Did not come from your graying head.

  One of the cleaning women used it on herself

  While you dozed off in your chambers

  Half undressed because of the heat.

  The black comb in the pocket over the heart,

  You feel it tremble just as ours do

  When they ready themselves to make music

  Lacking only the paper you’re signing,

  By the looks of it, with eyes closed.

  Dark Farmhouses

  Windy evening,

  China-blue snow,

  The old people are shivering

  In their kitchens.

  Truck without lights

  Idling on the highway,

  Is it a driver you require?

  Wait a bit.

  There’s coal to load up,

  A widow’s sack of coal.

  Is it a shovel you need?

  Idle on,

  A shovel will come by and by

  Over the darkening plain.

  A shovel,

  And a spade.

  Popular Mechanics

  The enormous engineering problems

  You’ll encounter attempting to crucify yourself

  Without helpers, pulleys, cogwheels,

  And other clever mechanical contrivances—

  In a small, bare, white room,

  With only a loose-legged chair

  To reach the height of the ceiling—

  Only a shoe to beat the nails in.

  Not to mention being naked for the occasion—

  So that each rib and muscle shows.

  Your left hand already spiked in,

  Only the right to wipe the sweat with,

  To help yourself to a butt

  From the overflowed ashtray,

  You won’t quite manage to light—

  And the night coming, the clever night.

  The Fly

  He was writing the History of Optimism

  In Time of Madness. It was raining.

  One of the local butcher’s largest

  Carrion fanciers kept pestering him.

  There was a cat too watching the fly,

  And a gouty-footed old woman

  In a dirty bathrobe and frayed slippers

  Bringing in a cup of pale tea.

  With many sighs and long pauses

  He found a bit of blue sky on the day of the Massacre of

  the Innocents.

  He found a couple of lovers,

  A meadow strewn with yellow flowers . . .

  But he couldn’t go on . . . O blue-winged, shivering one,

  he whispered.

  Some days it’s like using a white cane

  And seeing mostly shadows

  As one gropes for the words that come next!

  Outside a Dirtroad Trailer

  O exegetes, somber hermeneuts,

  Ingenious untanglers of ambiguities,

  A bald little man was washing

  The dainty feet of a very fat woman.

  In a chair under a soaring shade tree,

  She kept giggling and shaking her huge breasts.

  There was also a boy with glasses

  Engrossed in a book of serious appearance.

  One black sock drying on the line,

  A parked hearse with trash cans in the back,

  And a large flag hanging limp from the pole

  On a day as yet unproclaimed as a holiday.

  Dear Helen

  There’s a thing in the world

  Called a sea cucumber.

  I know nothing about it.

  It just sounds cold and salty.

  I think a salad of such cukes

  Would be fine today.

  I would have to dive for it, though,

  Deep into the treacherous depths

  While you mince the garlic

  And sip the white wine

  Into which the night is falling.

  I should be back soon

  With those lovely green vegetables


  Out of the shark-infested sea.

  Trees in the Open Country

  for Jim

  Like those who were eyewitnesses

  to an enormity

  And have since remained downcast

  At the very spot,

  Their shadows gradually lengthening

  Into what look like canes, badly charred,

  No choice but to lean on them eventually,

  Together, and in a kind of reverie,

  Awaiting the first solitary quip

  From the maddeningly occulted birds,

  Night birds bestirring themselves at last—

  If you are still listening,

  One has the impression the world

  Is adamant on a matter of great importance,

  And then—it isn’t anymore . . .

  Unless it’s now the leaves’ turn to reply?

  October Arriving

  I only have a measly ant

  To think with today.

  Others have pictures of saints,

  Others have clouds in the sky.

  The winter might be at the door,

  For he’s all alone

  And in a hurry to hide.

  Nevertheless, unable to decide

  He retraces his steps

  Several times and finds himself

  On a huge blank wall

  That has no window.

  Dark masses of trees

  Cast their mazes before him,

  Only to erase them next

  With a sly, sea-surging sound.

  Ancient Autumn

  Is that foolish youth still sawing

  The good branch he’s sitting on?

  Do the hills wheeze like old men

  And the few remaining apples sway?

  Can he see the village in the valley

  The way a chicken hawk would?

  Already smoke rises over the roofs,

  The days are getting short and chilly.

  Even he must rest from time to time,

  So he’s lit a long-stemmed pipe

  To watch a chimneysweep at work

  And a woman pin diapers on the line

  And then step behind some bushes,

  Hike her skirt so her bare ass shows

  While on the common humpbacked men

  Roll a barrel of hard cider or beer,

  And still beyond, past grazing cattle,

  Children play soldier and march in step.

  He thinks, if the wind changes direction,

  He’ll hear them shouting commands,

  But it doesn’t, so the black horseman

  On the cobbled road remains inaudible.

  One instant he’s coming his way,

  In the next he appears to be leaving in a hurry . . .

  It’s such scenes with their air of menace,

  That make him muddled in the head.

  He’s not even aware that he has resumed sawing,

  That the big red sun is about to set.

  Against Whatever It Is That’s Encroaching

  Best of all is to be idle,

  And especially on a Thursday,

  And to sip wine while studying the light:

  The way it ages, yellows, turns ashen

  And then hesitates forever

  On the threshold of the night

  That could be bringing the first frost.

  It’s good to have a woman around just then,

  And two is even better.

  Let them whisper to each other

  And eye you with a smirk.

  Let them roll up their sleeves and unbutton their shirts a bit

  As this fine old twilight deserves,

  And the small schoolboy

  Who has come home to a room almost dark

  And now watches wide-eyed

  The grownups raise their glasses to him,

  The giddy-headed, red-haired woman

  With eyes tightly shut,

  As if she were about to cry or sing.

  First Frost

  The time of the year for the mystics.

  October sky and the Cloud of Unknowing.

  The routes of eternity beckoning.

  Sign and enigma in the humblest of things.

  Master cobbler Jakob Boehme

  Sat in our kitchen all morning.

  He sipped tea and warned of the quiet

  To which the wise must school themselves.

  The young woman paid no attention.

  Hair fallen over her eyes,

  Breasts loose and damp in her robe,

  Stubbornly scrubbing a difficult stain.

  Then the dog’s bark brought us all outdoors,And that wasn’t just geese honking,

  But Dame Julian of Norwich herself discoursing

  On the marvelous courtesy and homeliness of the Maker.

  Without a Sough of Wind

  Against the backdrop

  Of a twilight world

  In which one has done so little

  For one’s soul

  She hangs a skirt

  On the doorknob

  Puts a foot on the chair

  To take off a black stocking

  And it’s good to have eyes

  Just then for the familiar

  Large swinging breasts

  And the cleft of her ass

  Before the recital

  Of that long day’s

  Woes and forebodings

  In the warm evening

  With the drone of insects

  On the window screen

  And the lit dial of a radio

  Providing what light there is

  Its sound turned much too low

  To make out the words

  Of what sounds like

  A silly old love song

  III

  from THE WORLD DOESN’T END

  My mother was a braid of black smoke.

  She bore me swaddled over the burning cities.

  The sky was a vast and windy place for a child to play.

  We met many others who were just like us. They were trying to put on their overcoats with arms made of smoke.

  The high heavens were full of little shrunken deaf ears instead of stars.

  I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time. One minute I was in the caravan suckling the dark teat of my new mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table eating my breakfast with a silver spoon.

  It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other one was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical bird.

  She’s pressing me gently with a hot steam iron, or she slips her hand inside me as if I were a sock that needed mending. The thread she uses is like the trickle of my blood, but the needle’s sharpness is all her own.

  “You will ruin your eyes, Henrietta, in such bad light,” her mother warns. And she’s right! Never since the beginning of the world has there been so little light. Our winter afternoons have been known at times to last a hundred years.

  We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap. All alone in the cellar, I could hear them pacing upstairs, tossing and turning in their beds. “These are dark and evil days,” the mouse told me as he nibbled my ear. Years passed. My mother wore a cat-fur collar which she stroked until its sparks lit up the cellar.

  I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It’s almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don’t even have any clothes on.

  The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving goodbye. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.

  “Everybody knows the story about me and Dr. Freud,” says my grandfather.

  “We were in love with the same pair of black shoes in the window of the same shoe
store. The store, unfortunately, was always closed. There’d be a sign: DEATH IN THE FAMILY or BACK AFTER LUNCH, but no matter how long I waited, no one would come to open.

  “Once I caught Dr. Freud there shamelessly admiring the shoes. We glared at each other before going our separate ways, never to meet again.”

  He held the Beast of the Apocalypse by its tail! Oh beards on fire, our doom appeared sealed. The buildings were tottering; the computer screens were as dark as our grandmother’s cupboard. We were too frightened to plead. Another century gone to hell—and for what? All because some people don’t know how to bring up their children.

  It was the epoch of the masters of levitation. Some evenings we saw solitary men and women floating above the dark treetops. Could they have been sleeping or thinking? They made no attempt to navigate. The wind nudged them ever so slightly. We were afraid to speak, to breathe. Even the nightbirds were quiet. Later, we’d mention the little book clasped in the hands of the young woman, and the way that old man lost his hat to the cypresses.

 

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