Free New and Selected Poems by Charles Simic Page A

brought you so many mysteries.
There was always someone you were meant to meet
Who for some reason wasn’t waiting.
Or perhaps they were? But not here, friend.
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You should have crossed the street
And followed that obviously demented woman
With the long streak of blood-red hair
Which the sky took up like a distant cry.
The Betrothal
I found a key
In the street, someone’s
House key
Lying there, glinting,
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Long ago; the one
Who lost it
Is not going to remember it
Tonight, as I do.
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It was a huge city
Of many dark windows,
Columns and domes.
I stood there thinking.
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The street ahead of me
Shadowy, full of peril
Now that I held
The key. One or two
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Late strollers
Unhurried and grave
In view. The sky above them
Of an unearthly clarity.
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Eternity jealous
Of the present moment,
It occurred to me!
And then the moment was over.
Frightening Toys
History practicing its scissor-clips
In the dark,
So everything comes out in the end
Missing an arm or a leg.
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Still, if that’s all you’ve got
To play with today . . .
This doll at least had a head,
And its lips were red!
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Frame houses like grim exhibits
Lining the empty street
Where a little girl sat on the steps
In a flowered nightgown, talking to it.
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It looked like a serious matter,
Even the rain wanted to hear about it,
So it fell on her eyelashes,
And made them glisten.
The Big War
We played war during the war,
Margaret. Toy soldiers were in big demand,
The kind made from clay.
The lead ones they melted into bullets, I suppose.
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You never saw anything as beautiful
As those clay regiments! I used to lie on the floor
For hours staring them in the eye.
I remember them staring back at me in wonder.
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How strange they must have felt
Standing stiffly at attention
Before a large, uncomprehending creature
With a mustache made of milk.
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In time they broke, or I broke them on purpose.
There was wire inside their limbs,
Inside their chests, but nothing in the heads!
Margaret, I made sure.
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Nothing at all in the heads . . .
Just an arm, now and then, an officer’s arm,
Wielding a saber from a crack
In my deaf grandmother’s kitchen floor.
Death, the Philosopher
He gives excellent advice by example.
“See!” he says. “See that?”
And he doesn’t have to open his mouth
To tell you what.
You can trust his vast experience.
Still, there’s no huff in him.
Once he had a most unfortunate passion.
It came to an end.
He loved the way the summer dusk fell.
He wanted to have it falling forever.
It was not possible.
That was the big secret.
It’s dreadful when things get as bad as that—
But then they don’t!
He got the point, and so, one day,
Miraculously lucid, you, too, came to ask
About the strangeness of it all.
Charles, you said,
How strange you should be here at all!
First Thing in the Morning
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To find a bit of thread
But twisted
In a peculiar way
And fallen
In an unlikely place
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A black thread
Before the mystery
Of a closed door
The greater mystery
Of the four bare walls
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And catch oneself thinking
Do I know anyone
Who wears such dark garments
Worn to threads
First thing in the morning?
The White Room
The obvious is difficult
To prove. Many prefer
The hidden. I did, too.
I listened to the trees.
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They had a secret
Which they were about to
Make known to me,
And then didn’t.
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Summer came. Each tree
On my street had its own
Scheherazade. My nights
Were a part of their wild
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Storytelling. We were
Entering dark houses,
More and more dark houses
Hushed and abandoned.
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There was someone with eyes closed
On the upper floors.
The thought of it, and the wonder,
Kept me sleepless.
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The truth is bald and cold,
Said the woman
Who always wore white.
She didn’t leave her room much.
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The sun pointed to one or two
Things that had survived
The long night intact.
The simplest things,
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Difficult in their obviousness.
They made no