New and Selected Poems Read online

  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 , [email protected].

  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.

  What is behind it?

  —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
<
br />   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:

  Somewhere close by

  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.