New and Selected Poems (3 page)

 

3

 

In this and in no other manner
Was the first ancestral broom made:
Namely, they plucked all the arrows
From the bent back of Saint Sebastian.
They tied them with the rope
On which Judas hung himself.
Stuck in the stilt
On which Copernicus
Touched the morning star . . .

 

Then the broom was ready
To leave the monastery.
The dust welcomed it—
The old pornographer
Immediately wanted to
Peek under its skirt.

 

4

 

The secret teaching of brooms
Excludes optimism, the consolation
Of laziness, the astonishing wonders
Of a glass of aged moonshine.

 

It says: the bones end up under the table.
Bread crumbs have a mind of their own.
The milk is you-know-who's semen.
The mice have the last squeal.

 

As for the famous business
Of levitation, I suggest remembering:
There is only one God
And his prophet is Muhammed.

 

5

 

And then finally there's your grandmother
Sweeping the dust of the nineteenth century
Into the twentieth, and your grandfather plucking
A straw out of the broom to pick his teeth.

 

Long winter nights.
Dawns a thousand years deep.
Kitchen windows like heads
Bandaged for toothache.

 

The broom beyond them sweeping,
Tucking the lucent grains of dust
Into neat pyramids,
That have tombs in them,

 

Already sacked by robbers,
Once, long ago.

Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.

They were talking about the war,
The table still uncleared in front of them.
Across the way, the first window
Of the evening was already lit.
He sat, hunched over, quiet,
The old fear coming over him . . .
It grew darker. She got up to take the plate—
Now harshly white—to the kitchen.
Outside in the fields, in the woods,
A bird spoke in proverbs,
A Pope went out to meet Attila,
The ditch was ready for the firing squad.

I love breasts, hard
Full breasts, guarded
By a button.

 

They come in the night.
The bestiaries of the ancients
Which include the unicorn
Have kept them out.

 

Pearly, like the east
An hour before sunrise,
Two ovens of the only
Philosopher's stone
Worth bothering about.

 

They bring on their nipples
Beads of inaudible sighs,
Vowels of delicious clarity
For the little red schoolhouse of our mouths.

 

Elsewhere, solitude
Makes another gloomy entry
In its ledger, misery
Borrows another cup of rice.

 

They draw nearer: Animal
Presence. In the barn
The milk shivers in the pail.

 

I like to come up to them
From underneath, like a kid
Who climbs on a chair
To reach a jar of forbidden jam.

 

Gently, with my lips,
Loosen the button.
Have them slip into my hands
Like two freshly poured beer mugs.

 

I spit on fools who fail to include
Breasts in their metaphysics,
Stargazers who have not enumerated them
Among the moons of the earth . . .

 

They give each finger
Its true shape, its joy:
Virgin soap, foam
On which our hands are cleansed.

 

And how the tongue honors
These two sour buns,
For the tongue is a feather
Dipped in egg yolk.

 

I insist that a girl
Stripped to the waist
Is the first and last miracle,
That the old janitor on his deathbed
Who demands to see the breasts of his wife
For one last time
Is the greatest poet who ever lived.

 

O my sweet yes, my sweet no,
Look, everyone is asleep on the earth.
Now, in the hush,
Drawing the waist
Of the one I love to mine,

 

I will tip each breast
Like a dark heavy grape
Into the hive
Of my drowsy mouth.

Charles Simic is a sentence.
A sentence has a beginning and an end.

 

Is he a simple or compound sentence?
It depends on the weather,
It depends on the stars above.

 

What is the subject of the sentence?
The subject is your beloved Charles Simic.

 

How many verbs are there in the sentence?
Eating, sleeping, and fucking are some of its verbs.

 

What is the object of the sentence?
The object, my little ones,
Is not yet in sight.

 

And who is writing this awkward sentence?
A blackmailer, a girl in love,
And an applicant for a job.

 

Will they end with a period or a question mark?
They'll end with an exclamation point and an ink spot.

There now, where the first crumb
Falls from the table
You think no one hears it
As it hits the floor,

 

But somewhere already
The ants are putting on
Their Quaker hats
And setting out to visit you.

1

 

When two times two was three,
The chicken without a head was hatched.
When the earth was still flat,
It fell off its edge, daydreaming.
When there were 13 signs in the zodiac,
It found a dead star for its gizzard.
When the first fox was getting married,
It taught itself to fly with one wing.
When all the eggs were still golden,
The clouds in the sky tasted like sweet corn.
When the rain flooded its coop,
Its wishbone was its ark.
Ah, when the chicken had only itself to roast,
The lightning was its skewer,
The thunder its baste and salt.

 

2

 

The chicken without a head made a sigh,
And then a hailstone out of that sigh,
And the window for the hailstone to strike.
Nine lives it made for itself,
And nine coats of solitude to dress them in.
It made its own shadow. Not true.
It only made a flea to bite holes in the dark.
Made it all out of nothing. Made a needle
To sew back its broken eggshell.
Made the lovers naked. Everybody else put clothes on them.
Its father made the knife, but it polished the blade,
Until it threw back its image like a funhouse mirror.
Made it all out of raglets of time.
Who's to say it'd be happier if it didn't?

 

3

 

Hear the song of a chicken without a head
As it goes scratching in grave dirt.
A song in which two parallel lines
Meet at infinity, in which God
Makes the last of the little apples,
In which golden fleece is heard growing
On a sad girl's pubes. The song
Of swearwords dreaming of a pure mouth.
The song of a doornail raised from the dead.
The song in half whisper because accomplices
Have been found, because the egg's safe
In the cuckoo's nest. The song
You wade into until your own hat floats.
A song of contagious laughter.
A lethal song.
That's right, the song of dark premonitions.

 

4

 

On a headless evening of a headless day
The chicken on fire and the words
Around it like a ring of fabulous beasts.
Each night it threw them a bite-size portion of its heart.
The words were hungry, the night held the fork.
Whatever the gallows bird made, its head unmade,
Its long-lost, axed-off head
Rose into the sky in a balloon of question marks.
Down below the great banquet went on:
The table that supplies itself with bread.
A saw that cuts a dream in half.
Wings so quick they don't get wet in heavy rain.
The egg that mutters to the frying pan:
I swear it by the hair in my yolk,
There's no such thing as a chicken without a head.

 

5

 

The chicken without a head ran a maze,
Ran half-plucked,
A serving fork stuck in its back,
Ran, backward, into the blue of the evening.
Ran upside down,
Someone huge and red-aproned rose in its wake.
Ran leaving its squinting head far behind,
Its head with a shock of red hair.
Ran up the church steeple,
And up the lightning rod on that steeple
For the wind to ruffle its feathers.
Ran, and is still running this Good Friday,
Between raindrops,
Hellfoxes on its trail.

Out of poverty
To begin again

 

With the taste of silence
On my tongue

 

Say a word,
Then listen to it fray

 

Thread by thread,
In the fading,

 

The already vanishing
Evening light.

 

•

 

So clear, it's obscure
The sense of existing

 

In this very moment,
Cheek by jowl with

 

My shadow on the wall
With its long, gallowslike,

 

Contorted neck
Bloodied by the sunset,

 

Watching and listening
To my own heartbeat.

 

•

 

This is breath, only breath.
Think it over, friend.

 

A shit-house fly weighs
Twice as much.

 

But when I tell the world so,
I'm less by a breath.

 

The struck match flares up
And nods in agreement

 

Before the dark claps it
With its heavy hands.

 

•

 

As strange as a shepherd
In the Arctic Circle.

 

Someone like Bo-peep.
All her sheep are white

 

And she can't get any sleep
Over lost sheep,

 

So she plays a flute
Which cries Bo-peep,

 

Which says, poor girl,
Take care of your sheep.

 

•

 

On a late afternoon of snow,
In a small unlit grocery store

 

Where a door has just opened
With a long, painful squeak,

 

A small boy carries a piece of paper
Between his thumb and forefinger

 

To the squint-eyed old woman
Bending low over the counter.

 

It's that paper I'm remembering,
And the quiet and the shadows.

 

•

 

You're not what you seem to be.
I'm not what I seem to be.

 

It's as if we were the unknowing
Inmates of someone's shadow box,

 

And its curtain was our breath
And so were the images it caught,

 

Which were like the world we know.
His gloves as gray as the sky

 

While he held us up by our feet
Swaying over the earth to and fro.

 

•

 

We need a marrying preacher.
Some crow, praise be,

 

By the side of the road
With a bloody beak

 

Studying a wind-leafed
Black book

 

All of whose pages are gold-edged
And blank,

 

While we wait, with frost thickening
On our eyelashes.

 

•

 

The sky of the desert,
The heavens of the crucified.

 

The great white sky
Of the visionaries.

 

Its one lone, ghostlike
Buzzard still hovering,

 

Writing the long century's
Obituary column

 

Over the white city,
The city of our white nights.

 

•

 

Mother gives me to the morning
On the threshold.

 

I have the steam of my breath
For a bride.

 

The snow on my shoes
The hems of her wedding dress,

 

My love always a step ahead,
Always a blur,

 

A whiteout
In the raging, dreamlike storm.