I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star charts
On the inner walls.
Poem Without a Title
I say to the lead,
“Why did you let yourself
Be cast into a bullet?
Have you forgotten the alchemists?
Have you given up hope
Of turning into gold?”
Nobody answers.
Lead. Bullet.
With names like that
The sleep is deep and long.
Concerning My Neighbors, the Hittites
Great are the Hittites.
Their ears have mice and mice have holes.
Their dogs bury themselves and leave the bones
To guard the house. A single weed holds all their storms
Until the spiderwebs spread over the heavens.
There are bits of straw in their lakes and rivers
Looking for drowned men. When a camel won’t pass
Through the eye of one of their needles,
They tie a house to its tail. Great are the Hittites.
Their fathers are in cradles, their newborn make war.
To them lead floats, a leaf sinks. Their god is the size
Of a mustard seed so that he can be quickly eaten.
•
They also piss against the wind,
Pour water in a leaky bucket,
Strike two tears to make fire,
And have tongues with bones in them,
Bones of a wolf gnawed by lambs.
•
They are also called you only live once,
They are called a small leak
Will sink a great ship, they are called
Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, they are called
You can’t take it to the grave with you.
It’s that hum in your left ear,
A sigh rising from deep within you,
A dream in which you keep falling forever,
The hour in which you sit up in bed
As though someone has called your name.
No one knows why the Hittites exist,
Still, when two are whispering
One of them is listening.
•
Did they catch the falling knife?
They caught it like a fly with closed mouths.
Did they balance the last egg?
They struck the egg with a bone so it won’t howl.
Did they wait for dead man’s shoes?
The shoes went in at one ear and out the other.
Did they wipe the blood from their mousetraps?
They burnt the blood to warm themselves.
Are they cold with no pockets in their shrouds?
If the sky falls, they shall have clouds for supper.
What do they have for us
To put in our pipes and smoke?
They have the braid of a beautiful girl
That drew a team of cattle
And the picture of him who slept
With dogs and rose with fleas
Searching for its trace in the sky.
•
And so, there are fewer and fewer of them now.
Who wrote their name on paper
And burnt the paper? Who put snake bones
In their pillows? Who threw nail parings
In their soup? Who made them walk
Under the ladder? Who stuck pins
In their snapshots?
The king of warts and his brother evil eye.
Bone-lazy and her sister rabbit’s-foot.
Cross-your-fingers and their father dog star.
Knock-on-wood and his mother hellfire.
Because the tail can’t wag the cow.
Because the woods can’t fly to the dove.
Because the stones haven’t said their last word.
Because dunghills rise and empires fall.
•
They are leaving behind
All the silver spoons
Found inside their throats at birth,
A hand they bit because it fed them,
Two rats from a ship that is still sinking,
A collection of various split hairs,
The leaf they turned over too late.
•
Here comes a forest in wolf’s clothing,
The wise hen bows to the umbrella.
When the bloodshot evening meets the bloodshot night,
That bare branch over them speaks louder than words.
The moon is worn threadbare.
I repeat: lean days don’t come singly,
It takes all kinds to make the sun rise.
The night is each man’s castle.
Don’t let the castle out of the bag.
Wind in the valley, wind in the high hills,
Practice will make this body fit this bed.
•
All roads lead
Out of a sow’s ear
To what’s worth
Two in the bush.
Invention of Nothing
I didn’t notice
while I wrote here
that nothing remains of the world
except my table and chair.
And so I said:
(to hear myself talk)
Is this the tavern
without a glass, wine, or waiter
where I’m the long-awaited drunk?
The color of nothing is blue.
I strike it with my left hand and the hand disappears.
Why am I so quiet then
and so happy?
I climb on the table
(the chair is gone already)
I sing through the throat
of an empty beer bottle.
Errata
Where it says snow
read teeth marks of a virgin
Where it says knife read
you passed through my bones
like a police whistle
Where it says table read horse
Where it says horse read my migrant’s bundle
Apples are to remain apples
Each time a hat appears
think of Isaac Newton
reading the Old Testament
Remove all periods
They are scars made by words
I couldn’t bring myself to say
Put a finger over each sunrise
it will blind you otherwise
That damn ant is still stirring
Will there be time left to list
all errors to replace
all hands guns owls plates
all cigars ponds woods and reach
that beer bottle my greatest mistake
the word I allowed to be written
when I should have shouted
her name
The Bird
A bird calls me
From a tall tree
In my dream,
Calls me from the pink twig of daylight,
From the long shadow
That inches each night closer to my heart,
Calls me from the edge of the world.
I give her my dream.
She dyes it red.
I give her my breath.
She turns it into rustling leaves.
She calls me from the highest cloud.
Her chirp
Like a match flickering
In a new grave.
•
Bird, shaped
Like the insides
Of a yawning mouth.
At daybreak,
When the sky turns clear and lucent
Like the water in which
They baptized a small child,
I climbed toward you.
The earth grew smaller underneath.
The howling emptiness
Chilled my feet,
And then my heart.
•
Later, I dozed off
In the woods,
Nestled in a small clearing
With the mist for a lover,
And dreamt I had
The stern eye
Of that bird
Watching me sleep.
Two Riddles
Hangs by a thread—
Whatever it is. Stripped naked.
Shivering. Human. Mortal.
On a thread finer than starlight.
By a power of a feeling,
Hangs, impossible, unthinkable,
Between the earth and the sky.
I, it says. I. I.
And how it boasts,
That everything that is to be known
About the wind
Is being revealed to it as it hangs.
•
It goes without saying . . .
What does? No one knows.
Goes mysterious, ah funereal,
Goes for the hell of it.
If it has an opinion,
It keeps it to itself.
If it brings tidings,
It plays dumb, plays dead.
No use trying to pin it down.
It’s elusive, of a retiring habit,
In a hurry of course, scurrying—
A blink of an eye and it’s gone.
All that’s known about it,
Is that it goes goes
Without saying.
Brooms
for Tomaz, Susan, and George
1
Only brooms
Know the devil
Still exists,
That the snow grows whiter
After a crow has flown over it,
That a dark dusty corner
Is the place of dreamers and children,
That a broom is also a tree
In the orchard of the poor,
That a hanging roach there
Is a mute dove.
2
Brooms appear in dream books
As omens of approaching death.
This is their secret life.
In public, they act like flat-chested old maids
Preaching temperance.
They are sworn enemies of lyric poetry.
In prison they accompany the jailer,
Enter cells to hear confessions.
Their short end comes down
When you least expect it.
Left alone behind a door
Of a condemned tenement,
They mutter to no one in particular,
Words like virgin wind moon-eclipse,
And that most sacred of all names:
Hieronymus Bosch.
3
In this and in no other manner
Was the first ancestral broom made:
Namely, they plucked all the arrows
From the bent back of Saint Sebastian.
They tied them with the rope
On which Judas hung himself.
Stuck in the stilt
On which Copernicus
Touched the morning star . . .
Then the broom was ready
To leave the monastery.
The dust welcomed it—
The old pornographer
Immediately wanted to
Peek under its skirt.
4
The secret teaching of brooms
Excludes optimism, the consolation
Of laziness, the astonishing wonders
Of a glass of aged moonshine.
It says: the bones end up under the table.
Bread crumbs have a mind of their own.
The milk is you-know-who’s semen.
The mice have the last squeal.
As for the famous business
Of levitation, I suggest remembering:
There is only one God
And his prophet is Muhammed.
5
And then finally there’s your grandmother
Sweeping the dust of the nineteenth century
Into the twentieth, and your grandfather plucking
A straw out of the broom to pick his teeth.
Long winter nights.
Dawns a thousand years deep.
Kitchen windows like heads
Bandaged for toothache.
The broom beyond them sweeping,
Tucking the lucent grains of dust
Into neat pyramids,
That have tombs in them,
Already sacked by robbers,
Once, long ago.
Watermelons
Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.
The Place
They were talking about the war,
The table still uncleared in front of them.
Across the way, the first window
Of the evening was already lit.
He sat, hunched over, quiet,
The old fear coming over him . . .
It grew darker. She got up to take the plate—
Now harshly white—to the kitchen.
Outside in the fields, in the woods,
A bird spoke in proverbs,
A Pope went out to meet Attila,
The ditch was ready for the firing squad.
Breasts
I love breasts, hard
Full breasts, guarded
By a button.
They come in the night.
The bestiaries of the ancients
Which include the unicorn
Have kept them out.
Pearly, like the east
An hour before sunrise,
Two ovens of the only
Philosopher’s stone
Worth bothering about.
They bring on their nipples
Beads of inaudible sighs,
Vowels of delicious clarity
For the little red schoolhouse of our mouths.
Elsewhere, solitude
Makes another gloomy entry
In its ledger, misery
Borrows another cup of rice.
They draw nearer: Animal
Presence. In the barn
The milk shivers in the pail.
I like to come up to them
From underneath, like a kid
Who climbs on a chair
To reach a jar of forbidden jam.
Gently, with my lips,
Loosen the button.
Have them slip into my hands
Like two freshly poured beer mugs.
I spit on fools who fail to include
Breasts in their metaphysics,
Stargazers who have not enumerated them
Among the moons of the earth . . .
They give each finger
Its true shape, its joy:
Virgin soap, foam
On which our hands are cleansed.
And how the tongue honors
These two sour buns,
For the tongue is a feather
Dipped in egg yolk.
I insist that a girl
Stripped to the waist
Is the first and last miracle,
That the old janitor on his deathbed
Who demands to see the breasts of his wife
For one last time
Is the greatest poet who ever lived.
O my sweet yes, my sweet no,
Look, everyone is asleep on the earth.
Now, in the hush,
Drawing the waist
Of the one I love to mine,
I will tip each breast
Like a dark heavy grape
Into the hive
Of my drowsy mouth.
Charles Simic
Charles Simic is a sentence.
A sentence has a beginning and an end.
&nbs
p; Is he a simple or compound sentence?
It depends on the weather,
It depends on the stars above.
What is the subject of the sentence?
The subject is your beloved Charles Simic.
How many verbs are there in the sentence?
Eating, sleeping, and fucking are some of its verbs.
What is the object of the sentence?
The object, my little ones,
Is not yet in sight.