New and Selected Poems Read Free Page A

you-know-who’s semen.
The mice have the last squeal.
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As for the famous business
Of levitation, I suggest remembering:
There is only one God
And his prophet is Muhammed.
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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.
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Long winter nights.
Dawns a thousand years deep.
Kitchen windows like heads
Bandaged for toothache.
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The broom beyond them sweeping,
Tucking the lucent grains of dust
Into neat pyramids,
That have tombs in them,
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Already sacked by robbers,
Once, long ago.
Watermelons
Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.
The Place
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.
Breasts
I love breasts, hard
Full breasts, guarded
By a button.
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They come in the night.
The bestiaries of the ancients
Which include the unicorn
Have kept them out.
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Pearly, like the east
An hour before sunrise,
Two ovens of the only
Philosopher’s stone
Worth bothering about.
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They bring on their nipples
Beads of inaudible sighs,
Vowels of delicious clarity
For the little red schoolhouse of our mouths.
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Elsewhere, solitude
Makes another gloomy entry
In its ledger, misery
Borrows another cup of rice.
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They draw nearer: Animal
Presence. In the barn
The milk shivers in the pail.
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I like to come up to them
From underneath, like a kid
Who climbs on a chair
To reach a jar of forbidden jam.
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Gently, with my lips,
Loosen the button.
Have them slip into my hands
Like two freshly poured beer mugs.
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I spit on fools who fail to include
Breasts in their metaphysics,
Stargazers who have not enumerated them
Among the moons of the earth . . .
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They give each finger
Its true shape, its joy:
Virgin soap, foam
On which our hands are cleansed.
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And how the tongue honors
These two sour buns,
For the tongue is a feather
Dipped in egg yolk.
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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.
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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,
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I will tip each breast
Like a dark heavy grape
Into the hive
Of my drowsy mouth.
Charles Simic
Charles Simic is a sentence.
A sentence has a beginning and an end.
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Is he a simple or compound sentence?
It depends on the weather,
It depends on the stars above.
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What is the subject of the sentence?
The subject is your beloved Charles Simic.
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How many verbs are there in the sentence?
Eating, sleeping, and fucking are some of its verbs.
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What is the object of the sentence?
The object, my little ones,
Is not yet in sight.
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And who is writing this awkward sentence?
A blackmailer, a girl in love,
And an applicant for a job.
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Will they end with a period or a question mark?
They’ll end with an exclamation point and an ink spot.
Solitude
There now, where the first crumb
Falls from the table
You think no one hears it
As it hits the floor,
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But somewhere already
The ants are putting on
Their Quaker hats
And setting out to visit you.
The Chicken Without a Head
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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