New and Selected Poems

by Charles Simic

  In the morning there were not even clouds in the sky. We saw a few crows preen themselves at the edge of the road; the shirts raise their empty sleeves on the blind woman’s clothesline.

  Ghost stories written as algebraic equations. Little Emily at the blackboard is very frightened. The X’s look like a graveyard at night. The teacher wants her to poke among them with a piece of chalk. All the children hold their breath. The white chalk squeaks once among the plus and minus signs, and then it’s quiet again.

  The city had fallen. We came to the window of a house drawn by a madman. The setting sun shone on a few abandoned machines of futility. “I remember,” someone said, “how in ancient times one could turn a wolf into a human and then lecture it to one’s heart’s content.”

  The stone is a mirror which works poorly. Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who’s to say? In the hush your heart sounds like a black cricket.

  Lover of endless disappointments with your collection of old postcards, I’m coming! I’m coming! You want to show me a train station with its clock stopped at five past five. We can’t see inside the stationmaster’s window because of the grime. We don’t even know if there’s a train waiting on the platform, much less if a woman in black is hurrying through the front door. There are no other people in sight, so it must be a quiet station. Some small town so effaced by time it has only one veiled widow left, and now she too is leaving with her secret.

  The hundred-year-old china doll’s head the sea washes up on its gray beach. One would like to know the story. One would like to make it up, make up many stories. It’s been so long in the sea, the eyes and nose have been erased, its faint smile is even fainter. With the night coming, one would like to see oneself walking the empty beach and bending down to it.

  Margaret was copying a recipe for “saints sautéed in onions” from an old cookbook. The ten thousand sounds of the world were hushed so we could hear the scratching of her pen. The saint was asleep in her bedroom with a wet cloth over his eyes. Outside the window, the author of the book sat in a flowering apple tree killing lice between his fingernails.

  A poem about sitting on a New York rooftop on a chill autumn evening, drinking red wine, surrounded by tall buildings, the little kids running dangerously to the edge, the beautiful girl everyone’s secretly in love with sitting by herself. She will die young but we don’t know that yet. She has a hole in her black stocking, big toe showing, toe painted red . . . And the skyscrapers . . . in the failing light . . . like new Chaldeans, pythonesses, Cassandras . . . because of their many blind windows.

  “Tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul,” writes Nietzsche. I always felt that too, Friedrich! The Amazon jungle with its brightly colored birds squawking in every tree, but its depths dark and hushed. The beautiful lost girl is giving suck to a little monkey. The great lizard in attendance wears ecclesiastical robes and speaks French to her: “La Reine des Reines,” he chants. Not the least charm of this tableau is that it can be so easily dismissed as preposterous and insulting to religious sentiments.

  Are Russian cannibals worse than the English? Of course. The English eat only your heart, the Russians the soul. “The soul is a mirage in the desert,” I told Anna Alexandrovna, but she went on eating mine anyway.

  “Like a confit of duck, or like a sparkling littleneck clam still in its native brine?” I inquired. But she just rubbed her tummy and smiled naughtily at me from across the table.

  My guardian angel is afraid of the dark. He pretends he’s not, sends me ahead, tells me he’ll be along in a moment. Pretty soon I can’t see a thing. “This must be the darkest corner of heaven,” someone whispers behind my back. It turns out her guardian angel is missing too. “It’s an outrage,” I tell her. “The dirty little cowards leaving us like this alone.” And of course, for all we know, one of us may be an old man on his deathbed and the other one a sleepy little girl with glasses.

  The old farmer in overalls hanging from a barn beam. The cows looking sideways. The old woman kneeling under his swaying feet in her Sunday black dress and touching the ground with her forehead like a Mohammedan. Outside the sky is full of sudsy clouds above an endless plowed field with no other landmarks in view.

  O witches, O poverty! The two who with a sidelong glance measured the thinness of my neck through the bars of the birdcage I carried on my shoulder . . .

  They were far too young and elegant to be storybook witches. They wore low-cut party dresses, black seams in their stockings, lips thickly painted red.

  The big-hearted trees offered their leaves by whispering armfuls over the winding path where the two eventually vanished.

  I was left with my cage, its idiotic feeding dish, the even more absurd vanity mirror, and the faintly sounding silver bell.

  Once I knew, then I forgot. It was as if I had fallen asleep in a field only to discover at waking that a grove of trees had grown up around me.

  “Doubt nothing, believe everything” was my friend’s idea of metaphysics, although his brother ran away with his wife. He still bought her a rose every day, sat in the empty house for the next twenty years talking to her about the weather.

  I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were my many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it!

  My friend’s empty house with every one of its windows lit. The dark trees multiplying all around it.

  Thousands of old men with pants lowered sleeping in public restrooms. You’re raving! You’re exaggerating! Thousands of Maria Magdalenas, I see, kneeling at their feet, weeping.

  A century of gathering clouds. Ghost ships arriving and leaving. The sea deeper, vaster. The parrot in the bamboo cage spoke several languages. The captain in the daguerreotype had his cheeks painted red. He brought a half-naked girl home from the tropics whom they kept chained in the attic till her death. After lunch, someone told of a race of people without mouths who subsisted only on the scent of flowers. It was the age of busy widow’s walks, fires lit with pages of love letters, long-trailing white gowns and much soundless screaming in the small hours of the night.

  The time of minor poets is coming. Goodbye Whitman, Dickinson, Frost. Welcome you whose fame will never reach beyond your closest family, and perhaps one or two good friends gathered after dinner over a jug of fierce red wine . . . while the children are falling asleep and complaining about the noise you’re making as you rummage through the closets for your old poems, afraid your wife might’ve thrown them out with last spring’s cleaning.

  It’s snowing, says someone who has peeked into the dark night, and then he, too, turns toward you as you prepare yourself to read, in a manner somewhat theatrical and with a face turning red, the long rambling love poem whose final stanza (unknown to you) is hopelessly missing.

  —after Aleksandar Ristović

  Lots of people around here have been taken for rides in UFOs. You wouldn’t think that possible with all the pretty white churches in sight so well attended on Sundays.

  “The round square doesn’t exist,” says the teacher to the dull-witted boy. His mother was abducted only last night. All expectations to the contrary, she sits in the corner grinning to herself. The sky is vast and blue.

  “They’re so small, they can sleep inside their own ears,” says one eighty-year-old twin to the other.

  My father loved the strange books of André Breton. He’d raise the wine glass and toast those far-off evenings “when butterflies formed a single uncut ribbon.” Or we’d go out for a piss in the back alley and he’d say, “Here are some binoculars for blindfolded eyes.” We lived in a rundown tenement that smelled of old people and their pets.

  “Hovering on the edge of the abyss, permeated with the perfume of the forbidden,” we’d take turns cutting the smoked sausage on the table. “I love America,” he’d tell us. We were going
to make a million dollars manufacturing objects we had seen in dreams that night.

  Someone shuffles by my door muttering, “Our goose is cooked.”

  Strange! I have my knife and fork ready. I even have the napkin tied around my neck, but the plate before me is still empty.

  Nevertheless, someone continues to mutter outside my door regarding a certain hypothetical, allegedly cooked goose that he claims is ours in common.

  My Secret Identity Is

  The room is empty,

  And the window is open

  IV

  from THE BOOK OF GODS AND DEVILS

  The Little Pins of Memory

  There was a child’s Sunday suit

  Pinned to a tailor’s dummy

  In a dusty store window.

  The store looked closed for years.

  I lost my way there once

  In a Sunday kind of quiet,

  Sunday kind of afternoon light

  On a street of red-brick tenements.

  How do you like that?

  I said to no one.

  How do you like that?

  I said it again today upon waking.

  That street went on forever

  And all along I could feel the pins

  In my back, prickling

  The dark and heavy cloth.

  St. Thomas Aquinas

  I left parts of myself everywhere

  The way absent-minded people leave

  Gloves and umbrellas

  Whose colors are sad from dispensing so much bad luck.

  I was on a park bench asleep.

  It was like the Art of Ancient Egypt.

  I didn’t wish to bestir myself.

  I made my long shadow take the evening train.

  “We give death to a child when we give it a doll,”

  Said the woman who had read Djuna Barnes.

  We whispered all night. She had traveled to darkest Africa.

  She had many stories to tell about the jungle.

  I was already in New York looking for work.

  It was raining as in the days of Noah.

  I stood in many doorways of that great city.

  Once I asked a man in a tuxedo for a cigarette.

  He gave me a frightened look and stepped out into the rain.

  Since “man naturally desires happiness,”

  According to St. Thomas Aquinas,

  Who gave irrefutable proof of God’s existence and purpose,

  I loaded trucks in the Garment Center.

  Me and a black man stole a woman’s red dress.

  It was of silk; it shimmered.

  Upon a gloomy night with all our loving ardors on fire,

  We carried it down the long empty avenue,

  Each holding one sleeve.

  The heat was intolerable, causing many terrifying human faces

  To come out of hiding.

  In the Public Library Reading Room

  There was a single ceiling fan barely turning.

  I had the travels of Herman Melville to serve me as a pillow.

  I was on a ghost ship with its sails fully raised.

  I could see no land anywhere.

  The sea and its monsters could not cool me.

  I followed a saintly-looking nurse into a doctor’s office.

  We edged past people with eyes and ears bandaged.

  “I am a medieval philosopher in exile,”

  I explained to my landlady that night.

  And, truly, I no longer looked like myself.

  I wore glasses with a nasty spider crack over one eye.

  I stayed in the movies all day long.

  A woman on the screen walked through a bombed city

  Again and again. She wore army boots.

  Her legs were long and bare. It was cold wherever she was.

  She had her back turned to me, but I was in love with her.

  I expected to find wartime Europe at the exit.

  It wasn’t even snowing! Everyone I met

  Wore a part of my destiny like a carnival mask.

  “I’m Bartleby the Scrivener,” I told the Italian waiter.

  “Me too,” he replied.

  And I could see nothing but overflowing ashtrays

  The human-faced flies were busy examining.

  A Letter

  Dear philosophers, I get sad when I think.

  Is it the same with you?

  Just as I’m about to sink my teeth into the noumenon,

  Some old girlfriend comes to distract me.

  “She’s not even alive!” I yell to heaven.

  The wintry light made me go out of my way.

  I saw beds covered with identical gray blankets.

  I saw grim-looking men holding a naked woman

  While they hosed her with cold water.

  Was that to calm her nerves, or was it punishment?

  I went to visit my friend Bob who said to me:

  “We reach the real by overcoming the seduction of images.”

  I was overjoyed, until I realized

  Such abstinence will never be possible for me.

  I caught myself looking out the window.

  Bob’s father was taking their dog for a walk.

  He moved with pain; the dog waited for him.

  There was no one else in the park,

  Only bare trees with an infinity of tragic shapes

  To make thinking difficult.

  Factory

  The machines were gone, and so were those who worked them.

  A single high-backed chair stood like a throne

  In all that empty space.

  I was on the floor making myself comfortable

  For a long night of little sleep and much thinking.

  An empty birdcage hung from a steam pipe.

  In it I kept an apple and a small paring knife.

  I placed newspapers all around me on the floor

  So I could jump at the slightest rustle.

  It was like the scratching of a pen,

  The silence of the night writing in its diary.

  Of rats who came to pay me a visit

  I had the highest opinion.

  They’d stand on two feet

  As if about to make a polite request

  On a matter of great importance.

  Many other strange things came to pass.

  Once a naked woman climbed on the chair

  To reach the apple in the cage.

  I was on the floor watching her go on tiptoe,

  Her hand fluttering in the cage like a bird.

  On other days, the sun peeked through dusty windowpanes

  To see what time it was. But there was no clock,

  Only the knife in the cage, glinting like a mirror,

  And the chair in the far corner

  Where someone once sat facing the brick wall.

  Shelley

  for M. Follain

  Poet of the dead leaves driven like ghosts,

  Driven like pestilence-stricken multitudes,

  I read you first

  One rainy evening in New York City,

  In my atrocious Slavic accent,

  Saying the mellifluous verses

  From a battered, much-stained volume

  I had bought earlier that day

  In a secondhand bookstore on Fourth Avenue

  Run by an initiate of the occult masters.

  The little money I had being almost spent,

  I walked the streets my nose in the book.

  I sat in a dingy coffee shop

  With last summer’s dead flies on the table.

  The owner was an ex-sailor

  Who had grown a huge hump on his back

  While watching the rain, the empty street.

  He was glad to have me sit and read.

  He’d refill my cup with a liquid dark as river Styx.

  Shelley spoke of a mad, blind, dying king;

  Of rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know;

  Of gr
aves from which a glorious Phantom may

  Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.

  I too felt like a glorious phantom

  Going to have my dinner

  In a Chinese restaurant I knew so well.

  It had a three-fingered waiter

  Who’d bring my soup and rice each night

  Without ever saying a word.

  I never saw anyone else there.

  The kitchen was separated by a curtain

  Of glass beads which clicked faintly

  Whenever the front door opened.

  The front door opened that evening

  To admit a pale little girl with glasses.