The Monster Loves His Labyrinth, page 8
The truth is, we are nearer to heaven each time we lie down. If you don’t believe look at the cat rolled over with his feet in the air. A sunny morning after the last night’s storm is an invitation to paradise, so we leapt out of bed to dress in a hurry, only to linger kissing and edge our way toward the bed again, astonished to find the ceiling over our heads, and not the blue sky.
Douce now, bare-assed Venus,
The fleas are awake.
The monster is in bed.
A naked light bulb over his head.
Naked women in the museum give the impression of liking to be looked at.
One-eyed cat in a fish store window.
Vacancy sign hung out on a windy evening to screech and keep us awake.
Who was my first ancestor to whistle in the dark?
The horror of a line that has just realized it’s been drawn toward infinity.
Labyrinthine cities of the mind where I’m always getting lost.
Olga the Bearded Lady was a daughter of a Hungarian general, half-sister of a French Duke, native of Paris, Moscow, Shanghai and New Jersey. This is nearly the story of my mother.
My father knew the network of passages connecting the Grand Central to the surrounding office buildings and hotels. He knew every cigar stand, public bathroom, shoe shine parlor and bar where he was greeted with cheer because he always left huge tips.
The simpler the object the vaster the dream.
The attentive eye begins to hear.
Everything, of course, is a mirror if you look at it long enough.
Bartleby giving up his work to stare at the blank wall outside his window always made sense to me.
The very pretty and now silent music box.
The thought that some nation out there in the world is not getting its just deserts always sends our armchair bombardiers into deep funk.
The porcupine crossing the busy highway with its quills erect.
Today’s Special: Baby lamb snatched from its mother, quickly skinned and slowly roasted.
If you bathe a cat, it will rain. If you bathe two cats— what happens then?
A broken refrigerator in the yard next to the plaster statues of the Virgin.
Descartes, I hear, did his best philosophizing by lazing in bed past noon. Not me! I’m on the way to the dump, tooting my horn and waving to the neighbors.
The mutt under the table eavesdrops on the love letter I’m writing and sighs.
The moon tonight is like the ass of a young bride squatting down to pee.
I was a fly on the ceiling in the house of arachnids, watching and listening as they sipped the red tea of sunset in the parlor.
Memphis Minnie singing: Hoodoo lady, you who turn water into wine, I wonder where you been hiding yourself all this time.
Grandmother dressing a little girl in white in a city to be bombed that day.
Playing house with you in a matchbox—that would be something!
A rolled newspaper with the president’s picture on the front page with which she goes searching for flies to kill.
The only concept of the state Republicans understand is the one in which the rich get richer by stealing from everyone else.
Tarpaper shanty with plastic over its windows and Bush/Cheney election sign in front.
It’s so quiet, one can hear the sound of the waves Homer heard on the Aegean.
My insomnia: An iceberg split from Infinity’s Pole.
The secret room was full of toys of dead children.
O Tristia, let’s get into bed and love each other till the bedsprings start to cry.
Three drunks on piano, guitar and saxophone playing “My Funny Valentine” in a corner saloon.
When aspiring mass murders are so much admired among us . . . Clearly, the nation feels strongly that there hasn’t been enough misery in the world, and that much more is wanted, so, of course, more is what we are going to get.
This crow nodding his head and putting down his foot with all due precaution, must’ve been a professor of philosophy in previous life who despite changed circumstances continues to turn things over in his mind, opening his beak wide as if to address his adoring students, and seeing nothing but a few fat snowflakes, resumes his stroll watched closely by another crow sitting glumly in a tree.
Artaud: “The hideous imprisonment of poetry in language.” Damn right! No! Damn wrong.
Nature gets bored too. That’s why it likes to see earthquakes, hurricanes, erupting volcanoes and old folk dying.
A clock that goes to 13. Was it in one of Philip Guston’s paintings that I saw it?
“Simic,” he said, “Why don’t you dye your hair green like Baudelaire?”
That woman’s bare ass is more attractive to me than paradise.
And then, one suspects, there were a few here and there who actually died laughing.
Cold, windy autumn night. A homeless woman on the corner talking to God, and he, as usual, having nothing to say.
It’s like rain in a silent movie, or like a ship on the bottom of the sea, or like a house of mirrors at closing time, or like the grave of the world-famous ventriloquist, or like the face of the bride as she sits down to pee after a night of love, or like a shirt drying on the line with no house near . . . Anyway, you get the idea.
I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of opening an umbrella inside the house.
Another century in which anyone who thought deeply found himself alone and speechless.
Anywhere conformity is an ideal, poetry is not welcome.
There are no keyholes left anywhere for old men like me to peep through, save on a gate to the cemetery with not much to see beyond but rows of well-tended graves. Wherever they’re shedding their clothes, they are not doing it here. There are a few fresh flags in view, a robin with a straw in its beak but no lace panties draped over tombstones.
According to Cioran, silence is as old as being, perhaps even older. He means the silence before there was time. This is the only God I believe in.
The rooster wears a bishop’s miter with the hens trailing after him nodding their heads and clucking after his early morning homily. The black and white mutt has found religion, too, barking at a cat in a tree, who sits watching the leaves fly.
Peck sparrows and you pigeons. Whoever is shaking the tablecloth with breadcrumbs of good and evil appears to be busy somewhere else today.
Poetry Books by Charles Simic
What the Grass Says
Somewhere among Us a Stone Is Taking Notes
Dismantling the Silence
White, New Rivers Press
Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk
Biography and a Lament, Bartholemew’s Cobble
Charon’s Cosmology
Brooms: Selected Poems, Edge Press
School for Dark Thoughts
Classic Ballroom Dances
Austerities
Weather Forecast for Utopia and Vicinity
Selected Poems
Unending Blues
Nine Poems, Exact Change
The World Doesn’t End
The Book of Gods and Devils
Hotel Insomnia
A Wedding in Hell: Poems
Frightening Toys, Faber & Faber
Walking the Black Cat: Poems
Jackstraws: Poems
Selected Early Poems
Night Picnic
The Voice at 3:00 a.m.: Selected Late and New Poems
Selected Poems: 1963-2003
Aunt Lettuce, I Want to Peek under Your Skirt
My Noiseless Entourage: Poems
Monkey Around
Sixty Poems
That Little Something: Poems
The Monster Loves His Labyrinth
Links
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/charles-simic
Acknowledgments
Selections from this book first appeared in Wonderful Words, Silent Truth, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1990. © 1990 by Charles Simic. Reprinted with the kind permission of the publisher.
Thanks to The Ohio Review, The London Review of Books, and Field, which first published other selections.
Ausable Press is especially grateful to Varujan Boghosian, Kathryn and David Heleniak, Christina Lau and Lori Bookstein Fine Art for their extraordinary efforts in arranging for the use of the cover art. Thanks also to Sheila Schwartz of the Saul Steinberg Foundation and Karen Nangle of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Copyright 2008 by Charles Simic
All rights reserved
Cover art: “Goodbye to All That,” by Varujan Boghosian 2006. Paper collage, 9.75 x 7.25 inches
Collection of Kathryn & David Heleniak
Courtesy of Lori Bookstein Fine Art
Photo by Paul Waldman
Author portrait: Saul Steinberg, “Charles Simic, 1993” Sketchbook page
Saul Steinberg Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, Yale University © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
ISBN: 1-931337-40-3
eISBN: 978-16193-2059-8
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Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth
