Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
from SELECTED EARLY POEMS
from UNENDING BLUES
from THE WORLD DOESN’T END
from THE BOOK OF GODS AND DEVILS
from HOTEL INSOMNIA
from A WEDDING IN HELL
from WALKING THE BLACK CAT
from JACKSTRAWS
from NIGHT PICNIC
from MY NOISELESS ENTOURAGE
from THAT LITTLE SOMETHING
from MASTER OF DISGUISES
from THE VOICE AT 3:00 a.m.
NEW POEMS
Index
About the Author
Copyright © 2013 by Charles Simic
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Simic, Charles, date.
[Poems. Selections]
New and selected poems 1962/2012 / Charles Simic.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-547-92828-9
I. Title.
PS3569.I4725N49 2013
811'.54—dc23 2012042188
eISBN 978-0-547-92830-2
v1.0313
The poems entitled Butcher Shop, Cockroach, Tapestry, Evening, The Inner Man, Fear, Summer Morning, Dismantling the Silence, Bestiary for the Fingers of My Right Hand, Fork, Knife, My Shoes, Stone, Poem Without a Title, Concerning My Neighbors, the Hittites, Invention of Nothing, errata, The Bird, Two Riddles, Brooms, Watermelons, The Place, Breasts, Charles Simic, Solitude, The Chicken Without a Head, White, What the White Had to Say, The Partial Explanation, The Lesson, A Landscape with Crutches, Help Wanted, Animal Acts, Charon’s Cosmology, The Ballad of the Wheel, A Wall, The Terms, Eyes Fastened with Pins, The Prisoner, Empire of Dreams, Prodigy, Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators, Shirt, Begotten of the Spleen, Toy Factory, The Little Tear Gland That Says, The Stream, Our Furniture Mover, Elegy, Note Slipped Under a Door, Grocery, Classic Ballroom Dances, Progress Report, Winter Night, The Cold, Devotions, Cold Blue Tinge, The Writings of the Mystics, Window Washer, Gallows Etiquette, In Midsummer Quiet, Peaceful Trees, My Beloved, Hurricane Season, Note, History, Strictly Bucolic, Crows, February, Punch Minus Judy, Austerities, Eastern European Cooking, My Weariness of Epic Proportions, Madonna Touched Up with a Goatee, and Midpoint are from Charles Simic: Selected Early Poems, copyright © 1999 by Charles Simic, and are reprinted with the permission of George Braziller, Inc. They may not be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, including print, photocopy, recording, or digital, without prior written permission from George Braziller, Inc., 277 Broadway, Suite 708 , New York, NY 10007 , georgebrazillerpr@aol.com.
The author is grateful to the editors of the following publications, where the new poems in this book were previously published: The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the Coffin Factory, the Harvard Review, Agni, the New York Review of Books, and Little Star.
“Softly” previously appeared in Lingering Ghosts (Cambridge, Mass., Studio7Arts, 2010 ).
Many of the poems in this collection have been revised and retitled.
for Abigail
I
from SELECTED EARLY POEMS
Butcher Shop
Sometimes walking late at night
I stop before a closed butcher shop.
There is a single light in the store
Like the light in which the convict digs his tunnel.
An apron hangs on the hook:
The blood on it smeared into a map
Of the great continents of blood,
The great rivers and oceans of blood.
There are knives that glitter like altars
In a dark church
Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile
To be healed.
There is a wooden block where bones are broken,
Scraped clean—a river dried to its bed
Where I am fed,
Where deep in the night I hear a voice.
Cockroach
When I see a cockroach,
I don’t grow violent like you.
I stop as if a friendly greeting
Had passed between us.
•
This roach is familiar to me.
We met here and there,
In the kitchen at midnight,
And now on my pillow.
•
I can see it has a couple
Of my black hairs
Sticking out of its head,
And who knows what else?
•
It carries a false passport—
Don’t ask me how I know.
A false passport, yes,
With my baby picture.
Tapestry
It hangs from heaven to earth.
There are trees in it, cities, rivers,
small pigs and moons. In one corner
the snow falling over a charging cavalry,
in another women are planting rice.
You can also see:
a chicken carried off by a fox,
a naked couple on their wedding night,
a column of smoke,
an evil-eyed woman spitting into a pail of milk.
—Space, plenty of empty space.
And who is talking now?
—A man asleep under his hat.
What happens when he wakes up?
—He’ll go into a barbershop.
They’ll shave his beard, nose, ears, and hair,
To make him look like everyone else.
Evening
The snail gives off stillness.
The weed is blessed.
At the end of a long day
The man finds joy, the water peace.
Let all be simple. Let all stand still
Without a final direction.
That which brings you into the world
To take you away at death
Is one and the same;
The shadow long and pointy
Is its church.
At night some understand what the grass says.
The grass knows a word or two.
It is not much. It repeats the same word
Again and again, but not too loudly . . .
The Inner Man
It isn’t the body
That’s a stranger.
It’s someone else.
We poke the same
Ugly mug
At the world.
When I scratch,
He scratches too.
There are women
Who claim to have held him.
A dog follows me about.
It might be his.
If I’m quiet, he’s quieter.
So I forget him.
Yet, as I bend down
To tie my shoelaces,
He’s standing up.
We cast a single shadow.
Whose shadow?
I’d like to say:
“He was in the beginning
And he’ll be in the end,”
But one can’t be sure.
At night
As I sit
Shuffling the cards of our silence,
I say to him:
“Though you utter
Every one of my words,
You are a stranger.
It’s time you spoke.”
Fear
Fear passes from man to man
Unknowing,
As one leaf passes its shudder
To another.
All at once the whole tree is trembling,
And there is no sign of the wind.
Summer Morning
I love to stay in bed
All morning,
Covers thrown off, naked,
Eyes closed, listening.
Outside they are opening
Their primers
In the little school
Of the cornfield.
There’s a smell of damp hay,
Of horses, laziness,
Summer sky and eternal life.
I know all the dark places
Where the sun hasn’t reached yet,
Where the last cricket
Has just hushed; anthills
Where it sounds like it’s raining;
Slumbering spiders spinning wedding dresses.
I pass over the farmhouses
Where the little mouths open to suck,
Barnyards where a man, naked to the waist,
Washes his face and shoulders with a hose,
Where the dishes begin to rattle in the kitchen.
The good tree with its voice
Of a mountain stream
Knows my steps.
It, too, hushes.
I stop and listen:
A stone cracks a knuckle,
Another rolls over in its sleep.
I hear a butterfly stirring
Inside a caterpillar,
I hear the dust talking
Of last night’s storm.
Farther ahead, someone
Even more silent
Passes over the grass
Without bending it.
And all of a sudden!
In the midst of that quiet,
It seems possible
To live simply on this earth.
Dismantling the Silence
Take down its ears first,
Carefully, so they don’t spill over.
With a sharp whistle slit its belly open.
If there are ashes in it, close your eyes
And blow them whichever way the wind is pointing.
If there’s water, sleeping water,
Bring the root of a flower that hasn’t drunk for a month.
When you reach the bones,
And you haven’t got a dog with you,
And you haven’t got a pine coffin
And a cart pulled by oxen to make them rattle,
Slip them quickly under your skin.
Next time you hunch your shoulders
You’ll feel them pressing against your own.
It is now pitch-dark.
Slowly and with patience
Search for its heart. You will need
To crawl far into the empty heavens
To hear it beat.
Bestiary for the Fingers of My Right Hand
1
Thumb, loose tooth of a horse.
Rooster to his hens.
Horn of a devil. Fat worm
They have attached to my flesh
At the time of my birth.
It takes four to hold him down,
Bend him in half, until the bone
Begins to whimper.
Cut him off. He can take care
Of himself. Take root in the earth,
Or go hunting with wolves.
2
The second points the way.
True way. The path crosses the earth,
The moon and some stars.
Watch, he points further.
He points to himself.
3
The middle one has backache.
Stiff, still unaccustomed to this life;
An old man at birth. It’s about something
That he had and lost,
That he looks for within my hand,
The way a dog looks
For fleas
With a sharp tooth.
4
The fourth is a mystery.
Sometimes as my hand
Rests on the table
He jumps by himself
As though someone called his name.
After each bone, finger,
I come to him, troubled.
5
Something stirs in the fifth,
Something perpetually at the point
Of birth. Weak and submissive,
His touch is gentle.
It weighs a tear.
It takes the mote out of the eye.
Fork
This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.
As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.
Spoon
An old spoon,
Chewed
And licked clean,
Fixing you
With its evil-eyed
Stare,
As you lean over
The soup bowl
On the table,
To make sure
Once more
There is nothing left.
Knife
1
Father-confessor
Of the fat hen
On the red altar
Of its throat,
A tongue,
All alone,
Bringing the darkness of a mouth
Now lost.
A single shining eye
Of a madman—
If there’s a tear in it,
Whom is it for?
2
It is a candle
It is also a track
Of crooked letters;
The knife’s mysterious writings.
We go down
An inner staircase.
We walk under the earth.
The knife lights the way.
Through bones of animals,
Water, beard of a wild boar—
We go through stones, embers,
We are after a scent.
3
So much darkness
Everywhere.
We are in a bag
Slung
Over someone’s shoulders.
You hear the sound
Of marching boots.
You hear the earth
Answering
With a hollow thud.
If it’s a poem
You want,
Take a knife;
A star of solitude,
It will rise and set in your hand.
My Shoes
Shoes, secret face of my inner life:
Two gaping toothless mouths,
Two partly decomposed animal skins
Smelling of mice nests.
My brother and sister who died at birth
Continuing their existence in you,
Guiding my life
Toward their incomprehensible innocence.
What use are books to me
When in you it is possible to read
The Gospel of my life on earth
And still beyond, of things to come?
I want to proclaim the religion
I have devised for your perfect humility
And the strange church I am building
With you as the altar.
Ascetic and maternal, you endure:
Kin to oxen, to Saints, to condemned men,
With your mute patience, forming
The only true likeness of myself.
Stone
Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.
From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.