THE LIFEBOAT
That cow left alone tonight
Out in the fields
Does it look up at the stars?
How about the cricket
That has just gone silent?
Was it in awe of what it saw?
The night sky loves
Men and women who climb mountains
To confide in its ear.
O the things I’d say to it
If I were to find myself
Alone in a lifeboat at sea.
PAST THE CEMETARY
It’s nice sitting here in the shade
At our small outdoor table
Facing a row of brownstones
In the late afternoon sunlight
Under a cloudless summer sky.
Together with its daily horrors,
Life doles out these small pleasures:
A platter of raw oysters on ice,
A ripe lemon sliced in half,
And a glass of chilled white wine.
If the couple holding hands at the next table
Are now in a hurry to leave,
Let them go ahead.
We’ll linger over this bottle
And then go looking for a bed ourselves.
STAR ATLAS
The madness of it, Miss Dickinson!
Then the dawning suspicion—
We are here alone ventriloquizing
For the one we call God.
Just to be sure, I lifted my eyes
From the star atlas to the night sky
And found one tiny star in it
Above a field covered in snow.
One more mystery for some boy
To ponder as he closes his schoolbook,
Sleepy boy chewing a thumb
As he rests his head on a table.
His tomorrow’s classroom empty;
Its huge blackboard wiped clean.
Just a low voice talking on TV
In the janitor’s quarters down the hall.
A quick tour by weather satellite
Of the bleak and desolate northern regions
Of our planet, predicting dropping
Temperatures and a blizzard or two
Someplace out there hard to imagine,
Like these photos of distant nebulae—
Blurry remains where portraits of old gods
Once hung hiding the horror from us.
The once popular sitcom everyone watched
Recounting their furies and squabbles
Regarding the fate of their terrestrial subjects,
Has been canceled, some say indefinitely.
The huge cast joining the line of the unemployed
Winding around the globe, stamping
Their feet and blowing on their hands
To keep warm as the long freeze sets in.
NIGHT OWLS
Addicts of introspection,
Inmates of inner prisons
Drawn and quartered
Between body and soul,
Eyeballing time and eternity,
Making burglar’s tools
Out of your ecstatic visions
To pick the lock of their mystery.
Scribblers of briefs and writs
Against a dissembling God.
Mad dogs of mystic love
On your way to the pound.
Fellow sufferers, wretches like me
And you pretty ladies too,
Let’s all get some shut-eye if we can.
AT TENDER MERCY
O lone streetlight,
Trying to shed
What light you can
On a spider repairing his web
This autumn night,
Stay with me,
As I push further and further
Into the dark.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHARLES SIMIC is a poet, essayist, and translator. He was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. His first poems were published in 1959, when he was twenty-one. In 1961 he was drafted into the U.S. Army, and in 1966 he earned his bachelor’s degree from New York University while working during the day to cover the costs of tuition. Since 1967, he has published twenty books of his own poetry, seven books of essays, a memoir, and numerous books of translations of Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian poetry, for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. His New and Selected Poems (1962–2012) was published in 2013 and The Lunatic was published in 2015. Simic is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and in 2007 he was chosen as poet laureate of the United States. He is emeritus professor of the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973.
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ALSO BY CHARLES SIMIC
What the Grass Says (1967)
Somewhere Among Us a Stone is Taking Notes (1969)
Dismantling the Silence (1971)
Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk (1974)
Charon’s Cosmology (1977)
Classic Ballroom Dances (1980)
Austerities (1982)
Selected Poems, 1963–1983 (1985)
Unending Blues (1986)
The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (1989)
The Book of Gods and Devils (1990)
Hotel Insomnia (1990)
A Wedding in Hell: Poems (1994)
Walking the Black Cat: Poems (1996)
Jackstraws: Poems (1999)
Night Picnic (2001)
The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems (2003)
Selected Poems: 1963–2003 (2004)
My Noiseless Entourage: Poems (2005)
2008: That Little Something: Poems (2008)
Master of Disguises (2010)
New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012 (2013)
The Lunatic (2015)
CREDITS
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover illustration © Jeff Östberg
COPYRIGHT
SCRIBBLED IN THE DARK. Copyright © 2017 by Charles Simic. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-266117-3
EPub Edition June 2017 ISBN 9780062661197
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