New and Selected Poems by Charles Simic Read Free Book Online

nose.
    Â 
Just a knife
To make a slit
Where your mouth
Ought to be.
    Â 
You can grin,
You can eat,
Spit the crumbs
Into our faces.
Eastern European Cooking
While Marquis de Sade had himself buggered—
Oh just around the time the Turks
Were roasting my ancestors on spits,
Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther.
    Â 
It was chilly, raw, down-in-the-mouth
We were slurping bean soup thick with smoked sausage,
On Second Avenue, where years before I saw an old horse
Pull a wagon piled up high with flophouse mattresses.
    Â 
Anyway, as I was telling my uncle Boris,
With my mouth full of pig’s feet and wine:
“While they were holding hands and sighing under parasols,
We were being hung by our tongues.”
    Â 
“I make no distinction between scum,”
He said, and he meant everybody,
Us and them: A breed of murderers’ helpers,
Evil-smelling torturers’ apprentices.
    Â 
Which called for another bottle of Hungarian wine,
And some dumplings stuffed with prunes,
Which we devoured in silence
While the Turks went on beating their cymbals and drums.
    Â 
Luckily we had this Transylvanian waiter,
A defrocked priest, ex–dancing school instructor,
Regarding whose excellence we were in complete agreement
Since he didn’t forget the toothpicks with our bill.
My Weariness of Epic Proportions
I like it when
Achilles
Gets killed
And even his buddy Patroclus—
And that hothead Hector—
And the whole Greek and Trojan
Jeunesse dorée

Are more or less
Expertly slaughtered
So there’s finally
Peace and quiet
(The gods having momentarily
Shut up)
One can hear
A bird sing
And a daughter ask her mother
Whether she can go to the well
And of course she can
By that lovely little path
That winds through
The olive orchard
Madonnas Touched Up with Goatees
Most ancient Metaphysics (poor Metaphysics!),
All decked out in imitation jewelry.
We went for a stroll, arm in arm, smooching in public
Despite the difference in ages.
    Â 
It’s still the nineteenth century, she whispered.
We were in a knife-fighting neighborhood
Among some rundown relics of the Industrial Revolution.
Just a little farther, she assured me,
In the back of a certain candy store only she knew about,
The customers were engrossed in the
Phenomenology of

     
the Spirit.
    Â 
It’s long past midnight, my dove, my angel!
We’d better be careful, I thought.
There were young hoods on street corners
With crosses and iron studs on their leather jackets.
They all looked like they’d read Darwin and that
      madman Pavlov,
And were about to ask us for a light.
Midpoint
No sooner had I left A.
Than I started doubting its existence:
Its streets and noisy crowds;
Its famous all-night cafés and prisons.
    Â 
It was dinnertime. The bakeries were closing:
Their shelves empty and white with flour.
The grocers were lowering their iron grilles.
A lovely young woman was buying the last casaba melon.
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Even the back alley where I was born
Blurs, dims . . . O rooftops!
Armadas of bedsheets and shirts
In the blustery, crimson dusk . . .
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•
    Â 
B. at which I am destined
To arrive by and by
Doesn’t exist now. Hurriedly
They’re building it for my arrival,
    Â 
And on that day it will be ready:
Its streets and noisy crowds . . .
Even the schoolhouse where I first
Forged my father’s signature . . .
    Â 
Knowing that on the day
Of my departure
It will vanish forever
Just as A. did.

 
    Â 
    Â 
    II
    Â 
from
UNENDING BLUES

December
            It snows
and still the derelicts
            go
carrying sandwich boards—
    Â 
            one proclaiming
the end of the world
            the other
the rates of a local barbershop
Toward Nightfall
    for Don and Jane
    Â 
The weight of tragic events
On everyone’s back,
Just as tragedy
In the proper Greek sense
Was thought