New and Selected Poems

by Charles Simic

  The poet spoke of the everlasting universe

  Of things . . . of gleams of a remoter world

  Which visit the soul in sleep . . .

  Of a desert peopled by storms alone . . .

  The streets were strewn with broken umbrellas

  Which looked like funereal kites

  This little Chinese girl might have made.

  The bars on MacDougal Street were emptying.

  There had been a fistfight.

  A man leaned against a lamppost arms extended as if crucified,

  The rain washing the blood off his face.

  In a dimly lit side street,

  Where the sidewalk shone like a ballroom mirror

  At closing time—

  A well-dressed man without any shoes

  Asked me for money.

  His eyes shone, he looked triumphant

  Like a fencing master

  Who had just struck a mortal blow.

  How strange it all was . . . The world’s raffle

  That dark October night . . .

  The yellowed volume of poetry

  With its Splendors and Glooms

  Which I studied by the light of storefronts:

  Drugstores and barbershops,

  Afraid of my small windowless room

  Cold as a tomb of an infant emperor.

  The Devils

  You were a “victim of semiromantic anarchism

  In its most irrational form.”

  I was “ill at ease in an ambiguous world

  Deserted by Providence.” We drank gin

  And made love in the afternoon. The neighbors’

  TVs were tuned to soap operas.

  The unhappy couples spoke little.

  There were interminable pauses.

  Soft organ music. Someone coughing.

  “It’s like Strindberg’s Dream Play,” you said.

  “What is?” I asked and got no reply.

  I was watching a spider on the ceiling.

  It was the kind St. Veronica ate in her martyrdom.

  “That woman subsisted on spiders only,”

  I told the janitor when he came to fix the faucet.

  He wore dirty overalls and a derby hat.

  Once he had been an inmate of a notorious state institution.

  “I’m no longer Jesus,” he informed us happily.

  He believed only in devils now.

  “This building is full of them,” he confided.

  One could see their horns and tails

  If one caught them in their baths.

  “He’s got Dark Ages on his brain,” you said.

  “Who does?” I asked and got no reply.

  The spider had the beginnings of a web

  Over our heads. The world was quiet

  Except when one of us took a sip of gin.

  Crepuscule with Nellie

  for Ira

  Monk at the Five Spot

  late one night.

  “Ruby, My Dear,” “Epistrophy.”

  The place nearly empty

  Because of the cold spell.

  One beautiful black transvestite

  alone up front,

  Sipping his drink demurely.

  The music Pythagorean,

  one note at a time

  Connecting the heavenly spheres,

  While I leaned against the bar

  surveying the premises

  Through cigarette smoke.

  All of a sudden, a clear sense

  of a memorable occasion . . .

  The joy of it, the delicious melancholy . . .

  This very strange man bent over the piano

  shaking his head, humming . . .

  “Misterioso.”

  Then it was all over, thank you!

  Chairs being stacked up on tables,

  their legs up.

  The prospect of the freeze outside,

  the long walk home,

  Making one procrastinatory.

  Who said Americans don’t have history,

  only endless nostalgia?

  And where the hell was Nellie?

  Two Dogs

  for Charles and Holly

  An old dog afraid of his own shadow

  In some Southern town.

  The story told me by a woman going blind,

  One fine summer evening

  As shadows were creeping

  Out of the New Hampshire woods,

  A long street with just a worried dog

  And a couple of dusty chickens,

  And all that sun beating down

  In that nameless Southern town.

  It made me remember the Germans marching

  Past our house in 1944 .

  The way everybody stood on the sidewalk

  Watching them out of the corner of the eye,

  The earth trembling, death going by . . .

  A little white dog ran into the street

  And got entangled with the soldiers’ feet.

  A kick made him fly as if he had wings.

  That’s what I keep seeing!

  Night coming down. A dog with wings.

  Evening Talk

  Everything you didn’t understand

  Made you what you are. Strangers

  Whose eye you caught on the street

  Studying you. Perhaps they were the all-seeing

  Illuminati? They knew what you didn’t,

  And left you troubled like a strange dream.

  Not even the light stayed the same.

  Where did all that hard glare come from?

  And the scent, as if mythical beings

  Were being groomed and fed stalks of hay

  On these roofs drifting among the evening clouds.

  You didn’t understand a thing!

  You loved the crowds at the end of the day

  That brought you so many mysteries.

  There was always someone you were meant to meet

  Who for some reason wasn’t waiting.

  Or perhaps they were? But not here, friend.

  You should have crossed the street

  And followed that obviously demented woman

  With the long streak of blood-red hair

  Which the sky took up like a distant cry.

  The Betrothal

  I found a key

  In the street, someone’s

  House key

  Lying there, glinting,

  Long ago; the one

  Who lost it

  Is not going to remember it

  Tonight, as I do.

  It was a huge city

  Of many dark windows,

  Columns and domes.

  I stood there thinking.

  The street ahead of me

  Shadowy, full of peril

  Now that I held

  The key. One or two

  Late strollers

  Unhurried and grave

  In view. The sky above them

  Of an unearthly clarity.

  Eternity jealous

  Of the present moment,

  It occurred to me!

  And then the moment was over.

  Frightening Toys

  History practicing its scissor-clips

  In the dark,

  So everything comes out in the end

  Missing an arm or a leg.

  Still, if that’s all you’ve got

  To play with today . . .

  This doll at least had a head,

  And its lips were red!

  Frame houses like grim exhibits

  Lining the empty street

  Where a little girl sat on the steps

  In a flowered nightgown, talking to it.

  It looked like a serious matter,

  Even the rain wanted to hear about it,

  So it fell on her eyelashes,

  And made them glisten.

  The Big War

  We played war during the war,

  Margaret. Toy soldiers were in big demand,
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  The kind made from clay.

  The lead ones they melted into bullets, I suppose.

  You never saw anything as beautiful

  As those clay regiments! I used to lie on the floor

  For hours staring them in the eye.

  I remember them staring back at me in wonder.

  How strange they must have felt

  Standing stiffly at attention

  Before a large, uncomprehending creature

  With a mustache made of milk.

  In time they broke, or I broke them on purpose.

  There was wire inside their limbs,

  Inside their chests, but nothing in the heads!

  Margaret, I made sure.

  Nothing at all in the heads . . .

  Just an arm, now and then, an officer’s arm,

  Wielding a saber from a crack

  In my deaf grandmother’s kitchen floor.

  Death, the Philosopher

  He gives excellent advice by example.

  “See!” he says. “See that?”

  And he doesn’t have to open his mouth

  To tell you what.

  You can trust his vast experience.

  Still, there’s no huff in him.

  Once he had a most unfortunate passion.

  It came to an end.

  He loved the way the summer dusk fell.

  He wanted to have it falling forever.

  It was not possible.

  That was the big secret.

  It’s dreadful when things get as bad as that—

  But then they don’t!

  He got the point, and so, one day,

  Miraculously lucid, you, too, came to ask

  About the strangeness of it all.

  Charles, you said,

  How strange you should be here at all!

  First Thing in the Morning

  To find a bit of thread

  But twisted

  In a peculiar way

  And fallen

  In an unlikely place

  A black thread

  Before the mystery

  Of a closed door

  The greater mystery

  Of the four bare walls

  And catch oneself thinking

  Do I know anyone

  Who wears such dark garments

  Worn to threads

  First thing in the morning?

  The White Room

  The obvious is difficult

  To prove. Many prefer

  The hidden. I did, too.

  I listened to the trees.

  They had a secret

  Which they were about to

  Make known to me,

  And then didn’t.

  Summer came. Each tree

  On my street had its own

  Scheherazade. My nights

  Were a part of their wild

  Storytelling. We were

  Entering dark houses,

  More and more dark houses

  Hushed and abandoned.

  There was someone with eyes closed

  On the upper floors.

  The thought of it, and the wonder,

  Kept me sleepless.

  The truth is bald and cold,

  Said the woman

  Who always wore white.

  She didn’t leave her room much.

  The sun pointed to one or two

  Things that had survived

  The long night intact.

  The simplest things,

  Difficult in their obviousness.

  They made no noise.

  It was the kind of day

  People described as “perfect.”

  Gods disguising themselves

  As black hairpins, a hand mirror,

  A comb with a tooth missing?

  No! That wasn’t it.

  Just things as they are,

  Unblinking, lying mute

  In that bright light—

  And the trees waiting for the night.

  Winter Sunset

  Such skies came to worry men

  On the eve of great battles

  With clouds soaked in blood

  Fleeing the armies of the night,

  An old woman was summoned

  Who could predict the future,

  But she kept her mouth shut

  Even when shown the naked sword.

  In what remained of the light,

  The white village church

  Clutched its bird-shaped weathervane

  Above the low rooftops.

  A small child, who had been

  Nursing at his mother’s breast,

  Hid his face from her

  To see the horses rear in the sky.

  The Pieces of the Clock Lie Scattered

  So, hurry up!

  The evening’s coming.

  The grownups are on the way.

  There’ll be hell to pay.

  You forgot about time

  While you sought its secret

  In the slippery wheels,

  Some of which had teeth.

  You meant to enthrall

  The girl across the hall.

  She drew so near,

  Her breast brushed your ear.

  She ought to have gone home,

  But you kept telling her

  You’ll have it together again

  And ticking in no time.

  Instead, you’re under the table

  Together, searching the floor.

  Your hands are trembling,

  And there’s a key in the door.

  The Immortal

  You’re shivering, O my memory.

  You went out early and without a coat

  To visit your old schoolmasters,

  The cruel schoolmasters and their pet monkeys.

  You took a wrong turn somewhere.

  You met an army of gray days,

  A ghost army of years on the march.

  It was the bread they fed you,

  The kind it takes a lifetime to chew.

  You found yourself again on that street

  Inside that small, rented room

  With its single dusty window.

  Outside it was snowing quietly,

  Snowing and snowing for days on end.

  You were ill and in bed.

  Everyone else had gone to work.

  The blind old woman next door,

  Whose sighs and heavy steps you’d welcome now,

  Had died mysteriously in the summer.

  You had your own heartbeat to attend to.

  You were perfectly alone and anonymous.

  It would have taken months for anyone

  To begin to miss you. The chill

  Made you pull the covers up to your chin.

  You remembered the lost arctic voyagers,

  The evening snow erasing their footprints.

  You had no money and no job.

  Both of your lungs were hurting; still,

  You had no intention of lifting a finger

  To help yourself. You were immortal!

  Outside, the same dark snowflake

  Seemed to be falling over and over again.

  You studied the cracked walls,

  The maplike water stain on the ceiling,

  Trying to fix in your mind its cities and rivers.

  Time had stopped at dusk.

  You were shivering at the thought

  Of such great happiness.

  At the Corner

  The fat sisters

  Kept a candy store

  Dim and narrow

  With dusty jars

  Of jawbreaking candy.

  We stayed thin, stayed

  Glum, chewing gum

  While staring at the floor,

  The shoes of many strangers

  Rushing in and out,

  Making the papers outside

  Flutter audibly

  Under the lead weights,

  Their headlines

  Screaming in and out of view.<
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  Cabbage

  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.

  The Initiate

  St. John of the Cross wore dark glasses

  When he passed me on the street.

  St. Therese of Ávila, beautiful and grave,