Tuesday, July 20, 2010

A Few Poems by Charles Simic

Our Angelic Ancestor

Rimbaud should have gone to America instead of Lake Chad. He'd be
a hundred year old and rummaging through a discount store. Didn't
he say he liked stupid paintings, signs, popular engravings, erotic
books with bad spelling, novels of our grandmothers?

Arthur, poor boy, you would have walked the length of Fourteenth
Street and written many more "Illuminations."

Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.




Secret History

Of the light in my room:
Its mood swings,
Dark-morning glooms,
Summer ecstasies.

Spider on the wall,
Lamp burning late,
Shoes left by the bed,
I'm your humble scribe.

Dust balls, simple souls
Conferring in the corner.
The pearl earring she lost,
Still to be found.

Silence of falling snow,
Night vanishing without trace,
Only to return.
I'm your humble scribe.




The Old Man Told Me

There was a movie theater here once. It played silent films. It was like
watching the world through dark classes on a rainy evening.

One night that piano player mysteriously disappeared. We ere left with
the storming sea that made no sound, and a beautiful woman on a long,
empty beach whose tears rolled down silently as she watched me falling
asleep in my mother's arms.





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