The World Doesn't End

  PROSE POEMS

  Charles Simic

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  ...

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Epigraph

  PART I

  My mother was a braid ...

  Scaliger turns deadly pale at ...

  I was stolen by the ...

  It's a store that specializes ...

  She's pressing me gently with ...

  We were so poor I ...

  I am the last Napoleonic ...

  "Everybody knows the story about ...

  He held the Beast of ...

  It was the epoch of ...

  Ghost stories written as algebraic ...

  In the fourth year of ...

  The city had fallen. We ...

  I PLAYED IN THE SMALLEST ...

  The stone is a mirror ...

  They wheeled out the ash ...

  Lover of endless disappointments with ...

  The flies in the Arctic ...

  HISTORY LESSON ...

  PART II

  The hundred-year-old china doll's head ...

  In a forest of question ...

  Everything's foreseeable. Everything has already ...

  He calls one dog Rimbaud ...

  A dog with a soul, ...

  Time—the lizard in the sunlight. ...

  Margaret was copying a recipe ...

  A poem about sitting on ...

  Dear Friedrich, the world's still ...

  "Tropical luxuriance around the idea ...

  The clouds told him their ...

  Are Russian cannibals worse than ...

  An actor pretending to eat ...

  The dead man steps down ...

  My guardian angel is afraid ...

  The dog went to dancing ...

  Things were not as black ...

  A hen larger than the ...

  The old farmer in overalls ...

  The rat kept lovebirds. The ...

  O witches, O poverty! The ...

  Once I knew, then I ...

  The ideal spectator who lives ...

  Thousands of old men with ...

  My thumb is embarking on ...

  GOSPEL ...

  PART III

  M. ...

  A century of gathering clouds. ...

  A black child wore the ...

  Police dogs in a dog ...

  Ambiguity created by a growing ...

  The time of minor poets ...

  At least four or five ...

  Comedy of errors at an ...

  The fat man who runs ...

  A week-long holiday in a ...

  Lots of people around here ...

  O the great God of ...

  I knew a night owl ...

  My father loved the strange ...

  An arctic voyager with a ...

  All this gets us Nowhere—which ...

  From inside the pot on ...

  Where ignorance is bliss, where ...

  He had mixed up the ...

  Someone shuffles by my door ...

  A much dwindled, starker annotator ...

  MY SECRET IDENTITY IS ...

  BOOKS BY CHARLES SIMIC

  A HARVEST BOOK

  HARCOURT BRACE & COMPANY

  San Diego New York London

  Copyright © 1989, 1988, 1987, 1986, 1985 by Charles Simic

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and

  retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should

  be mailed to: Permissions Department, Harcourt Brace & Company,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  Some of these pieces have previously appeared in the following

  magazines: to whose editors the author is grateful:

  Pequod, Caliban, Western Humanities Review,

  New American Writing, O-Blëk, Tri-Quarterly,

  New Directions Annual, Fire Fingers Review.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Simic, Charles, 1938–

  The world doesn't end; prose poems/Charles Simic.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-15-698350-8 (pbk.)

  I. Title. II. Title: World doesn't end.

  PS3569.14725W67 1989

  811'.54—dcl9 88-21128

  Design by Beth Tondreau Design/Jane Treuhaft

  Type set in Sabon

  Printed in the United States of America

  O Q S R P N

  for Jim Tate

  Contents

  PART I

  My mother was [>] Scaliger turns deadly [>] I was stolen [>] It's a store [>] She's pressing me [>] We were so poor [>] I am the last [>] Everybody knows the [>] He held the Beast [>] It was the epoch [>] Ghost stories written [>] In the fourth year [>] The city had fallen [>] I Played in the Smallest Theatres [>] The stone is [>] They wheeled out [>] Lover of endless [>] The flies [>] History Lesson [>]

  PART II

  The hundred-year-old [>] In a forest of [>] Everything's foreseeable [>] He calls one dog [>] A dog with a soul [>] Time—the lizard [>] Margaret was copying [>] A poem about sitting [>] Dear Friedrich [>] Tropical luxuriance [>] The clouds told him [>] Are Russian cannibals [>] An actor pretending [>] The dead man [>] My guardian angel [>] The dog went [>] Things were not [>] A hen larger [>] The old farmer [>] The rat kept [>] O witches, O poverty [>] Once I knew [>] The ideal spectator [>] Thousands of old men [>] My thumb is [>] Gospel [>]

  PART III

  M. [>] A century [>] A black child [>] Police dogs [>] Ambiguity created by [>] The time of minor poets [>] At least four [>] Comedy of errors [>] The fat man [>] A week-long holiday [>] Lots of people [>] O the great God [>] I knew a night owl [>] My father loved [>] An arctic voyager [>] All this gets us [>] From inside the pot [>] Where ignorance is [>] He had mixed up [>] Someone shuffles [>] A much dwindled [>] My Secret Identity Is [>]

  "Let's waltz the rumba."

  —Fats Waller

  PART I

  My mother was a braid of black smoke.

  She bore me swaddled over the burning cities.

  The sky was a vast and windy place for a child to play.

  We met many others who were just like us. They were trying to put on their overcoats with arms made of smoke.

  The high heavens were full of little shrunken deaf ears instead of stars.

  Scaliger turns deadly pale at the sight of watercress. Tycho Brahe, the famous astronomer, passes out at the sight of a caged fox. Maria de Medici feels instantly giddy on seeing a rose, even in a painting. My ancestors, meanwhile, are eating cabbage. They keep stirring the pot looking for a pigfoot which isn't there. The sky is blue. The nightingale sings in a Renaissance sonnet, and immediately someone goes to bed with a toothache.

  I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time. One minute I was in the caravan suckling the dark teat of my new mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table eating my breakfast with a silver spoon.

  It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other one was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical bird.

  It's a store that specializes in antique porcelain. She goes around it with a finger on her lips. Tsss! We must be quiet when we come near the tea cups. Not a breath allowed near the sugar bowls. A teeny grain of dust has fallen on a wafer-thin saucer. She makes an "oh" with her owlet-mouth. On her feet she wears soft, thickly padded slippers around which mice scurry.

  She's pressing me gently with a hot steam iron, or she slips her hand inside me as if I were a sock that needed mending. The thread she uses is like the trickle of my blood, but the needle's sharpness is all her own.

  "You will ruin your eyes, Henrietta, in such bad light," her mother warns. And she's right! Never since the beginning of the world has there been so little light. Our winter afternoons have been known at times to last a hundred years.

  We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap. All alone in the cellar, I could hear them pacing upstairs, tossing and turning in their beds. "These are dark and evil days," the mouse told me as he nibbled my ear. Years passed. My mother wore a cat-fur collar which she stroked until its sparks lit up the cellar.

  I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It's almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don't even have any clothes on.

  The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-by. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.

  "Everybody knows the story about me and Dr. Freud," says my grandfather.

  "We were in love with the same pair of black shoes in the window of the same shoe store. The store, unfortunately, was always closed. There'd be a sign: DEATH IN THE FAMILY or BACK AFTER LUNCH, but no matter how long I waited, no one would come to open.

  "Once I caught Dr. Freud there shamelessly admiring the shoes. We glared at each other before going our separate ways, never to meet again."

  He held the Beast of the Apocalypse by its tail, the stupid kid! Oh beards on fire, our doom appeared sealed. The buildings were tottering; the computer screens were as dark as our grandmother's cupboards. We were too frightened to plead. Another century gone to hell—and for what? Just because some people don't know how to bring their children up!

  It was the epoch of the masters of levitation. Some evenings we saw solitary men and women floating above the dark tree tops. Could they have been sleeping or thinking? They made no attempt to navigate. The wind nudged them ever so slightly. We were afraid to speak, to breathe. Even the nightbirds were quiet. Later, we'd mention the little book clasped in the hands of the young woman, and the way that old man lost his hat to the cypresses.

  In the morning there were not even clouds in the sky. We saw a few crows preen themselves at the edge of the road; the shirts raise their empty sleeves on the blind woman's clothesline.

  Ghost stories written as algebraic equations. Little Emily at the blackboard is very frightened. The X's look like a graveyard at night. The teacher wants her to poke among them with a piece of chalk. All the children hold their breath. The white chalk squeaks once among the plus and minus signs, and then it's quiet again.

  In the fourth year of the war, Hermes showed up. He was not much to look at. His mailman's coat was in tatters; mice ran in and out of its pockets. The broad-brimmed hat he was wearing had bullet holes. He still carried the famous stick that closes the eyes of the dying, but it looked gnawed. Did he let the dying bite on it? Whatever the case, he had no letters for us. "God of thieves!" we shouted behind his back when he could no longer hear us.

  The city had fallen. We came to the window of a house drawn by a madman. The setting sun shone on a few abandoned machines of futility. "I remember," someone said, "how in ancient times one could turn a wolf into a human and then lecture it to one's heart's content."

  I PLAYED IN THE SMALLEST THEATRES

  Bits of infernal gravel

  On the window sill

  Surrounding a solitary

  White bread crumb.

  The stone is a mirror which works poorly. Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who's to say? In the hush your heart sounds like a black cricket.

  They wheeled out the ash blonde who believes herself already dead into the spike-fenced garden of the hospital for the insane. Her name was Amy or Ann, but she didn't answer to either one. She kept her eyes tightly shut. She was pushed by a nurse in white.

  Some of it was told to me by a shivering young man who insisted that it's been raining for years, even indoors. "Coming down real hard," he said.

  Lover of endless disappointments with your collection of old postcards, I'm coming! I'm coming! You want to show me a train station with its clock stopped at five past five. We can't see inside the station master's window because of the grime. We don't even know if there's a train waiting on the platform, much less if a woman in black is hurrying through the front door. There are no other people in sight, so it must be a quiet station. Some small town so effaced by time it has only one veiled widow left, and now she too is leaving with her secret.

  The flies in the Arctic Circle all come from my sleepless nights. This is how they travel: The wind takes them from butcher to butcher; then the cows' tails get busy at milking time.

  At night in the northern woods they listen to the moose, the loon.... The summer there is so brief, they barely have time to count their legs.

  "Brave as a postage stamp crossing the ocean," they drone and sigh, and already it's time to make snowballs, the little gray ones with stones in them.

  HISTORY LESSON

  The roaches look like

  Comic rustics

  In serious dramas.

  PART II

  The hundred-year-old china doll's head the sea washes up on its gray beach. One would like to know the story. One would like to make it up, make up many stories. It's been so long in the sea, the eyes and nose have been erased, its faint smile is even fainter. With the night coming, one would like to see oneself walking the empty beach and bending down to it.

  In a forest of question marks you were no bigger than an asterisk.

  O the season of mists! Someone blew the hunting horn.

  The dictionary said you were a sign indicating an omission; then it changed the subject abruptly and spoke of "asterisms," which supposedly have to do with crystals showing a starlike luminous figure.

  You didn't believe a word of it. The question marks had valentines carved on their trunks so you wouldn't look up and notice the ropes.

  Greasy ropes with baby nooses.

  Everything's foreseeable. Everything has already been foreseen. What has been fated cannot be avoided. Even this boiled potato. This fork. This chunk of dark bread. This thought too....

  My grandmother sweeping the sidewalk knows that. She says there's no god, only an eye here and there that sees clearly. The neighbors are too busy watching TV to burn her as a witch.

  He calls one dog Rimbaud and the other Höl-derlin. They are both mongrels. "The unexamined life is not worth living" is his favorite saying. His wife looks like Delacroix's half-naked Liberty. She wears cowboy boots, picks dangerous-looking mushrooms in the forest. Tonight they will light tall candles and drink wine. Later, they'll open the door for the dogs to come in and eat the scraps under the table. "Entrez, mes enfants!" he'll shout into the night, bowing deeply from the waist.

  A dog with a soul, you've got that? You apes with heads of Socrates, false priests' altar boys, retired professors of evil! I imagine cities so I can get lost in them. I meet other dogs with souls when I'm not lighting firecrackers in heads that are about to doze off.

  Blood-and-guts firecrackers. In the dark to see, you ass-scratchers! In the dark to see.

  Time—the lizard in the sunlight. It doesn't move, but its eyes are wide open. They love to gaze into our faces and hearken to our discourse.

  It's because the very first men were lizards. If you don't believe me, go grab one by the tail and see it come right off.

  Margaret was copying a recipe for "saints roasted with onions" from an old cook book. The ten thousand sounds of the world were hushed so we could hear the scratchings of her pen. The saint was asleep in the bedroom with a wet cloth over his eyes. Outside the window, the author of the book sat in a flowering apple tree killing lice between his fingernails.

  A poem about sitting on a New York rooftop on a chill autumn evening, drinking red wine, surrounded by tall buildings, the little kids running dangerously to the edge, the beautiful girl everyone's secretly in love with sitting by herself. She will die young but we don't know that yet. She has a hole in her black stocking, big toe showing, toe painted red ... And the skyscrapers ... in the failing light ... like new Chaldeans, pythonesses, Cassandras ... because of their many blind windows.

  Dear Friedrich, the world's still false, cruel and beautiful....

  Earlier tonight, I watched the Chinese laundryman, who doesn't read or write our language, turn the pages of a book left behind by a customer in a hurry. That made me happy. I wanted it to be a dreambook, or a volume of foolishly sentimental verses, but I didn't look closely.

  It's almost midnight now, and his light is still on. He has a daughter who brings him dinner, who wears short skirts and walks with long strides. She's late, very late, so he has stopped ironing and watches the street.

  If not for the two of us, there'd be only spiders hanging their webs between the street lights and the dark trees.

 

1 2