Free New and Selected Poems by Charles Simic

strange it all was . . . The world’s raffle
That dark October night . . .
The yellowed volume of poetry
With its Splendors and Glooms
Which I studied by the light of storefronts:
Drugstores and barbershops,
Afraid of my small windowless room
Cold as a tomb of an infant emperor.
The Devils
You were a “victim of semiromantic anarchism
In its most irrational form.”
I was “ill at ease in an ambiguous world
    Â 
Deserted by Providence.” We drank gin
And made love in the afternoon. The neighbors’
TVs were tuned to soap operas.
    Â 
The unhappy couples spoke little.
There were interminable pauses.
Soft organ music. Someone coughing.
    Â 
“It’s like Strindberg’s Dream Play,” you said.
“What is?” I asked and got no reply.
I was watching a spider on the ceiling.
    Â 
It was the kind St. Veronica ate in her martyrdom.
“That woman subsisted on spiders only,”
I told the janitor when he came to fix the faucet.
    Â 
He wore dirty overalls and a derby hat.
Once he had been an inmate of a notorious state institution.
“I’m no longer Jesus,” he informed us happily.
    Â 
He believed only in devils now.
“This building is full of them,” he confided.
One could see their horns and tails
    Â 
If one caught them in their baths.
“He’s got Dark Ages on his brain,” you said.
“Who does?” I asked and got no reply.
    Â 
The spider had the beginnings of a web
Over our heads. The world was quiet
Except when one of us took a sip of gin.
Crepuscule with Nellie
    for Ira
    Â 
Monk at the Five Spot
        late one night.
“Ruby, My Dear,” “Epistrophy.”
        The place nearly empty
Because of the cold spell.
One beautiful black transvestite
        alone up front,
Sipping his drink demurely.
    Â 
The music Pythagorean,
        one note at a time
Connecting the heavenly spheres,
While I leaned against the bar
        surveying the premises
Through cigarette smoke.
    Â 
All of a sudden, a clear sense
        of a memorable occasion . . .
The joy of it, the delicious melancholy . . .
This very strange man bent over the piano
        shaking his head, humming . . .
    Â 
“Misterioso.”
    Â 
Then it was all over, thank you!
Chairs being stacked up on tables,
        their legs up.
The prospect of the freeze outside,
        the long walk home,
Making one procrastinatory.
    Â 
Who said Americans don’t have history,
        only endless nostalgia?
And where the hell was Nellie?
Two Dogs
    for Charles and Holly
    Â 
An old dog afraid of his own shadow
In some Southern town.
The story told me by a woman going blind,
One fine summer evening
As shadows were creeping
Out of the New Hampshire woods,
A long street with just a worried dog
And a couple of dusty chickens,
And all that sun beating down
In that nameless Southern town.
    Â 
It made me remember the Germans marching
Past our house in 1944 .
The way everybody stood on the sidewalk
Watching them out of the corner of the eye,
The earth trembling, death going by . . .
A little white dog ran into the street
And got entangled with the soldiers’ feet.
A kick made him fly as if he had wings.
That’s what I keep seeing!
Night coming down. A dog with wings.
Evening Talk
Everything you didn’t understand
Made you what you are. Strangers
Whose eye you caught on the street
Studying you. Perhaps they were the all-seeing
Illuminati? They knew what you didn’t,
And left you troubled like a strange dream.
    Â 
Not even the light stayed the same.
Where did all that hard glare come from?
And the scent, as if mythical beings
Were being groomed and fed stalks of hay
On these roofs drifting among the evening clouds.
    Â 
You didn’t understand a thing!
You loved the crowds at the end of the day
That