The School Of Metaphysics

Charles Simic

Executioner happy to explain
How his wristwatch works
As he shadows me on the street.
I call him that because he is grim and officious
And wears black.

The clock on the church tower
Had stopped at five to eleven.
The morning newspapers had no date.
The gray building on the corner
Could've been a state pen,

And then he showed up with his watch,
Whose Gothic numerals
And the absence of hands
He wanted me to understand
Right then and there.

Window Washer

Charles Simic

And again the screech of the scaffold
High up there where all our thoughts converge:
Lightheaded, hung
By a leather strap,

Twenty stories up
In the chill of late November
Wiping the grime
Off the pane, the many windows

Which have no way of opening,
Tinted windows mirroring the clouds
That are like equestrian statues,
Phantom liberators with sabers raised

Before these dark offices,
And their anonymous multitudes
Bent over this day's
Wondrously useless labor.

Encyclopedia of Horrors

Charles Simic (2008)

Nobody reads it but the insomniacs.
How strange to find a child,
Slapped by its mother only this morning,
And the mad homeless woman
Who squatted to urinate in the street.

Perhaps they've missed something?
That smoke-shrouded city after a bombing raid,
The corpses like cigarette butts
In a dinner plate overflowing with ashes.
But no, everyone is here.

O were you to come, invisible tribunal,
There'd be too many pages to thumb through,
Too many stories to listen to,
Like the ones about guards playing cards
After they were done beating their prisoner.

Night Picnic

Charles Simic (2001)

There was the sky, starless and vast—
Home of every one of our dark thoughts—
Its door open to more darkness.
And you, like a late door-to-door salesman,
With only your own beating heart
In the palm of your outstretched hand.

All things are imbued with God’s being—
She said in hushed tones
As if his ghost might overhear us—
The dark woods around us,
Our faces which we cannot see,
Even this bread we are eating.

You were mulling over the particulars
Of your cosmic insignificance
Between slow sips of red wine.
In the ensuing quiet, you could hear
Her small sharp teeth chewing the crust—
And then finally, she moistened her lips.

The Alarm

Charles Simic (2004)

The hundreds of windows filling with faces
Because of something that happened on the street,
Something no one is able to explain,
Because there was no fire engine, no scream, no gunshot,
And yet here they all are assembled,
Some with hands over their children's eyes,
Others leaning out and shouting
To people walking the streets far below
With the same composure and serene appearance
Of those going for a Sunday stroll
In some other century, less violent than ours.

Watermelons

Charles Simic

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

The Prisoner

Charles Simic

He is thinking of us.
These leaves, their lazy rustle
That made us sleepy after lunch
So we had to lie down.

He considers my hand on her breast,
Her closed eyelids, her moist lips
Against my forehead, and the shadows of trees
Hovering on the ceiling.

It's been so long. He has trouble
Deciding what else is there.
And all along the suspicion
That we do not exist.

2008: Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith by Mary Oliver

Stone

Charles Simic (b.1938)

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.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill —
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

2008: Once by Richard Wilbur