New and Selected Poems

by Charles Simic

  Came at me spreading her wings like a seagull.

  “Lost soul,” they both cried out,

  “Where is your home?”

  I was one of death’s juggling balls.

  The city was a mystic circus

  With all of its lights dimmed,

  The night’s performance already started.

  On a wide, poorly lit avenue,

  Store windows waited for me,

  Watched for me coming,

  Knew what thoughts were on my mind.

  In a church, where the child killer,

  So the papers said,

  Hid himself one night from the cold,

  I sat in a pew blowing on my hands.

  Like a thought forgotten till called forth—

  The new snow on the sidewalk

  Bore fresh footprints—some unknown master

  Offering to guide my steps from now on.

  In truth, I had no idea what was happening to me.

  Four young hoods blocked my way,

  Three dead serious,

  One smiling crazily as he laid his hand on me.

  I let them have my raincoat,

  And went off telling myself

  It was important to remain calm,

  And to continue to observe oneself

  As if one was a complete stranger.

  At the address I’d been given,

  There were white X’s painted on each window.

  I knocked, but no one came to open.

  By and by a girl joined me on the steps.

  Her name was Alma, a propitious sign.

  She knew a housewife

  Who solved life’s riddles

  In a voice of a Sumerian queen.

  We had a long chat about that

  While shivering and stamping our feet.

  In the sixteenth century, she told me,

  Dabblers in occult sciences

  Were roasted in iron cages,

  Or else they were clothed in rags

  And hanged on gibbets painted gold.

  Once in a hotel room in Chicago, I confessed,

  I caught sight of someone in the mirror

  Who had my face,

  But whose eyes I did not recognize—

  Two hard, all-knowing eyes.

  The hunger, the cold and the lack of sleep

  Brought on a kind of ecstasy.

  I walked the streets as if pursued by demons,

  Trying to warm myself.

  There was the East River,

  There was the Hudson.

  Their waters shone at midnight

  Like oil in sanctuary lamps.

  Something was about to happen to me

  For which there would never be any words afterward.

  I stood as if transfixed,

  Watching the sky clear.

  It was so quiet where I was,

  You could hear a pin drop.

  I thought I heard a pin drop

  And went looking for it

  In the dark, deserted city.

  1986–2011

  Paradise

  In a neighborhood once called Hell’s Kitchen

  Where a beggar claimed to be playing Nero’s fiddle

  While the city burned in midsummer heat;

  Where a lady barber who called herself Cleopatra

  Wielded the scissors of fate over my head

  Threatening to cut off my ears and nose;

  Where a man and a woman went walking naked

  In one of the dark side streets at dawn.

  I must be dreaming, I told myself.

  It was like meeting a couple of sphinxes.

  I expected them to have wings, bodies of lions:

  Him with his wildly tattooed chest;

  Her with her huge, dangling breasts.

  It happened so quickly, and so long ago!

  You know that time just before the day breaks

  When one yearns to lie down on cool sheets

  In a room with shades drawn?

  The hour when the beautiful suicides

  Lying side by side in the morgue

  Get up and walk out into the first light.

  The curtains of cheap hotels flying out of windows

  Like seagulls, but everything else quiet . . .

  Steam rising out of the subway gratings . . .

  Bodies glistening with sweat . . .

  Madness, and you might even say, paradise!

  In the Library

  for Octavio

  There’s a book called

  A Dictionary of Angels.

  No one has opened it in fifty years,

  I know, because when I did,

  The covers creaked, the pages

  Crumbled. There I discovered

  The angels were once as plentiful

  As species of flies.

  The sky at dusk

  Used to be thick with them.

  You had to wave both arms

  Just to keep them away.

  Now the sun is shining

  Through the tall windows.

  The library is a quiet place.

  Angels and gods huddled

  In dark unopened books.

  The great secret lies

  On some shelf Miss Jones

  Passes every day on her rounds.

  She’s very tall, so she keeps

  Her head tipped as if listening.

  The books are whispering.

  I hear nothing, but she does.

  The Wail

  As if there were nothing to live for . . .

  As if there were . . . nothing.

  In the fading light, our mother

  Sat sewing with her head bowed.

  Did her hand tremble? By the first faint

  Hint of night coming, how all lay

  Still, except for the memory of that voice:

  Him whom the wild life hurried away . . .

  Long stretches of silence in between.

  Clock talking to a clock.

  Dogs lying on their paws with ears cocked.

  You and me afraid to breathe.

  Finally, she went to peek. Someone covered

  With a newspaper on the sidewalk.

  Otherwise, no one about. The street empty.

  The sky full of homeless clouds.

  The Scarecrow

  God’s refuted but the devil’s not.

  This year’s tomatoes are something to see.

  Bite into them, Martha,

  As you would into a ripe apple.

  After each bite add a little salt.

  If the juices run down your chin

  Onto your bare breasts,

  Bend over the kitchen sink.

  From there you can see your husband

  Come to a dead stop in the empty field

  Before one of his bleakest thoughts

  Spreading its arms like a scarecrow.

  Windy Evening

  This old world needs propping up

  When it gets this cold and windy.

  The cleverly painted sets,

  Oh, they’re shaking badly!

  They’re about to come down.

  There’ll be nothing but infinite space then.

  The silence supreme. Almighty silence.

  Egyptian sky. Stars like torches

  Of grave robbers entering the crypts of the kings.

  Even the wind pausing, waiting to see.

  Better grab hold of that tree, Lucille.

  Its shape crazed, terror-stricken.

  I’ll hold the barn.

  The chickens in it uneasy.

  Smart chickens, rickety world.

  V

  from HOTEL INSOMNIA

  Evening Chess

  The Black Queen raised high

  In my father’s angry hand.

  The City

  At least one crucified at every corner.

  The eyes of a mystic, madman, murderer.

  They know it’s truly for nothing.

  The e
yes do. All the martyr’s sufferings

  On parade. Exalted mother of us all

  Tending her bundles on the sidewalk,

  Speaking to each as if it were a holy child.

  There were many who saw none of this.

  A couple lingered on kissing lustily

  Right where someone lay under a newspaper.

  His bloody feet, swollen twice their size,

  Jutted out into the cold of the day,

  Grim proofs of a new doctrine.

  I tell you, I was afraid. A man screamed

  And continued walking as if nothing had happened.

  Everyone whose eyes I sought avoided mine.

  Was I beginning to resemble him a little?

  I had no answer to any of these questions.

  Neither did the crucified on the next corner.

  Stub of a Red Pencil

  You were sharpened to a fine point

  With a rusty razor blade.

  Then the unknown hand swept the shavings

  Into its moist palm

  And disappeared from view.

  You lay on the desk next to

  The official-looking document

  With a long list of names.

  It was up to us to imagine the rest:

  The high ceiling with its cracks

  And odd-shaped water stains;

  The window with its view

  Of roofs covered with snow.

  An inconceivable, varied world

  Surrounding your severe presence

  On every side,

  Stub of a red pencil.

  The Prodigal

  Dark morning rain

  Meant to fall

  On a prison and a schoolyard,

  Falling meanwhile

  On my mother and her old dog.

  How slow she shuffles now

  In my father’s Sunday shoes.

  The dog by her side

  Trembling with each step

  As he tries to keep up.

  I am on another corner waiting

  With my head shaved.

  My mind hops like a sparrow

  In the rain.

  I’m always watching and worrying about her.

  Everything is a magic ritual,

  A secret cinema,

  The way she appears in a window hours later

  To set the empty bowl

  And spoon on the table,

  And then exits

  So that the day may pass,

  And the night may fall

  Into the empty bowl,

  Empty room, empty house,

  While the rain keeps

  Knocking at the front door.

  Hotel Insomnia

  I liked my little hole,

  Its window facing a brick wall.

  Next door there was a piano.

  A few evenings a month

  A crippled old man came to play

  “My Blue Heaven.”

  Mostly, though, it was quiet.

  Each room with its spider in heavy overcoat

  Catching his fly with a web

  Of cigarette smoke and revery.

  So dark,

  I could not see my face in the shaving mirror.

  At 5 A.M. the sound of bare feet upstairs.

  The “Gypsy” fortuneteller,

  Whose storefront is on the corner,

  Going to pee after a night of love.

  Once, too, the sound of a child sobbing.

  So near it was, I thought

  For a moment, I was sobbing myself.

  The Inanimate Object

  In my long late-night talks with the jailers, I raised again the question of the object: Does it remain indifferent whether it is perceived or not? (I had in mind the one concealed and found posthumously while the newly vacated cell was fumigated and swept.)

  “Like a carved-wood demon of some nightmarish species,” said one. “In cipher writ,” said another. We were drinking a homemade brew that made our heads spin. “When a neck button falls on the floor and hardly makes a sound,” said the third with a smile, but I said nothing.

  “If only one could leave behind a little something to make others stop and think,” I thought to myself.

  In the meantime, there was my piece of broken bottle to worry about. It was green and had a deadly cutting edge. I no longer remembered its hiding place, unless I had only dreamed of it, or this was another cell, another prison in an infinite series of prisons and long night talks with my jailers.

  Outside Biaggi’s Funeral Home

  Three old women sat knitting

  On the sidewalk

  Every time I walked by.

  Good evening, ladies,

  I would say to them.

  Good morning, too.

  What a lovely time of year

  To be alive!

  While they stared at me,

  The way house cats stare at a TV

  When their owner is at work,

  Two of them resuming their knitting,

  The third watching me

  Go my way

  With her mouth hanging open.

  And that was all.

  I left the neighborhood and they stayed

  Knitting away.

  They could be still there today

  For it’s that kind of day,

  Sweet and mild,

  It made me think of them again

  After a long, long while.

  The Tiger

  in memory of George Oppen

  In San Francisco, that winter,

  There was a dark little store

  Full of sleepy Buddhas.

  The afternoon I walked in,

  No one came out to greet me.

  I stood among the sages

  As if trying to read their thoughts.

  One was huge and made of stone.

  A few were the size of a child’s head

  And had stains the color of dried blood.

  There were even some no bigger than mice,

  And they appeared to be listening.

  “The winds of March, black winds,

  The gritty winds,” the dead poet wrote.

  At sundown his street was empty

  Except for my long shadow

  Open before me like scissors.

  There was his house where I told the story

  Of the Russian soldier,

  The one who looked Chinese.

  He lay wounded in my father’s bed,

  And I brought him water and matches.

  For that he gave me a little tiger

  Made of ivory. Its mouth was open in anger,

  But it had no stripes left.

  There was the night when I colored

  Its eyes black, its tongue red.

  My mother held the lamp for me,

  While worrying about the kind of luck

  This beast might bring us.

  The tiger in my hand growled faintly

  When we were alone in the dark,

  But when I put my ear to the poet’s door

  That afternoon, I heard nothing.

  “The winds of March, black winds,

  The gritty winds,” he once wrote.

  Clouds Gathering

  It seemed the kind of life we wanted.

  Wild strawberries and cream in the morning.

  Sunlight in every room.

  The two of us walking by the sea naked.

  Some evenings, however, we found ourselves

  Unsure of what comes next.

  Like tragic actors in a theater on fire,

  With birds circling over our heads,

  The dark pines strangely still,

  Each rock we stepped on bloodied by the sunset.

  We were back on our terrace sipping wine.

  Why always this hint of an unhappy ending?

  Clouds of almost human appearance

  Gathering on the horizon, but the rest lovely

  With the air so mild and the sea untroubled.


  The night suddenly upon us, a starless night.

  You lighting a candle, carrying it naked

  Into our bedroom and blowing it out quickly.

  The dark pines and grasses strangely still.

  Folk Songs

  Sausage makers of History,

  The bloody kind,

  You all hail from a village

  Where the dog barking at the moon

  Is the only poet.

  •

  O King Oedipus, O Hamlet,

  Fallen like flies

  In the pot of cabbage soup,

  No use beating with your fists,

  Or sticking your tongues out.

  •

  Christ-faced spider on the wall