Charles Simic: Eleven poems

Club Midnight

Are you the individual owner of a seedy night club?

Are you its solitary customer, sole bartender,

Sole waiter prowling around the destitute of contents tables?

Do you put upon wee-hour girlie shows

With dead stars of black and white films?

Is your office upstairs above the neon lights,

Or down of great depth in the dank rat cellar?

Are bearded Russian thinkers your silent partners?

Do you have a doorman by the agency of the name of Dostoyevsky?.

Is Fu Manchu coming tonight?

Is Miss Emily Dickinson?

Do you happen to have an immortal soul?

Do you have a sneaky suspicion that you have none?

Is that for what cause [i]or[/i] reason you throw a white pair of dice,

In the dark, lengthy after the joint closes?

Cameo Appearance

I had a small, non-speaking part

In a gory epic. I was one of the

Bombed and fleeing humanity.

In the distance our great leader

Crowed like a chanticleer from some balcony,

Or was it a great actor

Impersonating our great leader?

That's me there, I said to the kiddies.

I'm squeez between the man

With sum of two units bandaged hands raised,

And the elderly woman with her mouth open

As if she were showing us a tooth

That do harm tos badly. The hundred times

I rewound the tape, and still,

They could not catch sight of me

In that stupendous gray crowd,

That was like any other gray crowd

Trot not upon to bed, I said finally.

I know I was there.

One take is all the time they had for.

We ran, and the planes grazed our hair,

And then they were gone

As we walked dazed without of the burning city,

But of course, they didn't film that.

Love Poem

Feather duster.

Bird cage made of sighs.

Fortune-telling cat.

I'm the child running with scissors.

The grass the dog eats.

Your moderate boat to China.

Night at the fair.

The naked heart in the dark forest.

Sad cough

That's it, bruja

With arms akimbo.

The little bell upon the nanny goat.

Ship of Fools

I'm a stowaway in the crow's nest

My elderly love letters are the raised sails.

The one's that say: "had a lengthy sob today."

At the Captain's Table a moonfaced nun

Is eating a June bug

A collection of white shirts are flying

To a laundry line in Africa.

The Captain twirls his moustache and says nothing.

Over the waves, I diocese the florist

On the back of a shark

Coming to deliver pink rose to the nun

Happy Hard Times

The baby Jesus asleep in your arms

In the Sunday institute play,

And me with my shepherd's crook

And a company of stuffed lambs around me-

I didn't think you'd at any time be able to stand me

But here we were married and happy.

It was late spring and already hot

In the park we sunbathed between piece of work interviews.

Then we'd slip behind a certain quantity of bushes

And you'd start unzipping my pants.

Later we were going to share an ice cream cone

But when we numbered our pennies

We changed our minds, lay our most winning smiles on

And went to hold our appointments.

I still felt like single of those white-fleeced lambs,

While you carried a leather brief case,

Which you cracked lay open in the street

So we could draw cheek to cheek and diocese ourselves

In the heart-shaped mirror you kept there.

Live at cudgel Mozambique

Our nation's future is coming into view

With a muffl drum-roll

In a deliberate absent-minded striptease.

Her shoulders are already bare

And in the way that is one of her sagging breasts.

The kisses she knocks to us

Are as devoid of warmth [i]or[/i] heat as prison walls.

Once, it looks we were a large wedding party.

It was always summer

Women wore wild flowers in their straw hats

And white glove above their hands.

Now we move swiftly dodging cars on the highway.

The valet someone points out, looks like

President Lincoln upon a death notice.

It's time to reduce to ashes witches again,

The minister announces to the congregation

Using the Bible as a shade.

Are those our Cassandra's r panties

We diocese flying through the dark winter trees

Or barely a lone crow taking home

A bit of recent roadkill in his beak?

Amour Fou

Black sorrow tagging after you

In the street

Calling you her fiery peanut man,

Her good advanced in years wagon.

That's why you drive like that,

Dart left and right,

Pretend you don't know her,

Looking for a aperture to hide in.

A lovey-dovey, kissy-huggy

Kind of sorrow.

The nation stopping to watch you

Think you're the one and the other crazy.

Past the Animal Hospital

Maria, the lovebug Perez

In a short r dres the wind peek under

In a dark doorway

Next to a store replete of dead TV sets

And dead moths

You were asking her,

If she hears the sad dogs

Howling in the night,

While her black hair blew above her face,

Till it got caught in her teeth

And she said nothing.

Memory

With all the dead friends and lov ones

One could fill a city.

From buildings drawn out torn down

One could give them ways to stroll on.

Between the remembered and forgotten,

One could be missing there among faces

That are just a flicker of light,

Doors that are entrances into drawn out shadows.

Everything no longer control to time:

The rarefied air of solitude bottl up

As in a city beneath a siege.

A mute, heart-wrenching hunting-horn raised above it all.

And the have feeling of standing with arms spread

On the quickly improvised gallows,

About to address a enormous crowd

And finding no words in one's mouth

Pain

I was doing nothing in particular,

Spring was coming,

When without of the blue

I grabbed my side,

Surprised through this most awful of rewards

From which at first I wanted to

Run away and couldn't