Jackstraws: Poems (Harvest Book) - Tapa blanda

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Charles Simic was a poet, essayist, and translator who was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. He published more than twenty books of poetry, in addition to a memoir and numerous books of translations for which he received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. In 2007, he served as poet laureate of the United States. He was a distinguished visiting writer at New York University and professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught since 1973. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-four.

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Excerpt

The Voice at 3 A.M.

Who put canned laughter
Into my crucifixion scene?

Speck-Sized Screaming Head

Hoping to make yourself heard,
Mr. No-See?
Busting your balls
For one long, bloodcurdling scream,
Out of the dustheap
At my feet.

Fat chance. Someone's just putting
A quarter in the jukebox,
Someone else is starting the pink Cadillac convertible
On the street,
And I'm lifting and cocking the broom
In your direction.

The Soul Has Many Brides

In India I was greatly taken up
With a fly in a temple
Which gave me the distinct feeling,
It was possible, just possible,
That we had met before.

Was it in Mexico City?
Climbing the blood-spotted, yellow legs
Of the crucified Christ
While his eyes grew larger and larger.
"May God seat you on the highest throne
Of his invisible Kingdom,"
A blind beggar said to me in English.
He knew what I saw.

At the saloon where Pancho Villa
Fired his revolvers at the ceiling,
On the bare ass of a naked nymph
Stepping out of a lake in a painting,
And now shamelessly crawling up
One of Buddha's nostrils,
Whose smile got even more secretive,
Even more squint-eyed.

The History of Costumes

Top hats and tight-fit monkey suits,
You pointed to the map of the world
With your silver-tipped walking sticks
And fixed my fate forever on a dot.

Already on the very next page,
I saw my white sailor suit parachuting
Among bricks and puffs of smoke
In a building split in half by a bomb,

The smoke that was like the skirts
Slit on the side to give the legs the freedom
To move while dancing the tango
Past ballroom mirrors on page 1944.

Medieval Miniature

Souls burning in hell,
How exceedingly modest your eternal torments
Appear to me in comparison
To that of a firebombed city.

A couple of awkward-looking devils
Are sticking long pitchforks in you.
Another is down on his knees
Reviving the fire by blowing on it.

It's enough to make the sinners go ha-ha,
When in two whoops and a holler
A whole neighborhood can be incinerated
Leaving nothing much to see.

A lone dog roaming in the rubble
Can break the meanest heart.
By the looks of it he's young
And curious. We leave him thus,

Earnestly digging with his paws.
The woman licked by flames
In the meantime has divine breasts.
The unknown artist made sure of that.

Private Eye

To find clues where there are none,
That's my job now, I said to the
Dictionary on my desk. The world beyond
My window has grown illegible,
And so has the clock on the wall.
I may strike a match to orient myself.

In the meantime, there's the heart-
Stopping hush as the building
Empties, the elevators stop running,
The grains of dust stay put.
Hours of quiescent sleuthing
Before the Madonna with the mop

Shuffles down the long corridor
Trying doorknobs, turning mine.
That's just little old me sweating
In the customer's chair, I'll say.
Keep your nose out of it.
I'm not closing up till he breaks.

The Common Insects of North America

Bumble Bee, Soldier Bug, Mormon Cricket,
They are all out there somewhere
In the audience, as it were,
Behind Joe's Garage, in the tall weeds
By the snake handler's church,
On the fringe of a beaver pond.

Painted Beauty is barefoot and recumbent.
Clouded Wood Nymph has been sight-seeing
And has caught a shiver. Book Louse
Is reading about the battle of Gettysburg.
Chinese Mantid is praying again.

Now that Rat Flea is feeling amorous,
Hermit Beetle has elected to play
Sotto voce in the woods. Widow Dragonfly
Doing leg splits could use a pair of
Eentsy-weentsy prescription shades
Before she comes to a dreadful end.

De Occulta Philosophia

Evening sunlight,
Your humble servant
Seeks initiation
Into your occult ways.

Out of the late-summer sky,
Its deepening quiet,
You brought me a summons,
A small share in some large
And obscure knowledge.

Tell me something of your study
Of lengthening shadows,
The blazing windowpanes
Where the soul is turned into light--
Or don't just now.

You have the air of someone
Who prefers to dwell in solitude,
The one who enters, with gravity
Of mien and imposing severity,
A room suddenly rich in enigmas.

Oh supreme unknowable,
The seemingly inviolable reserve
Of your stratagems
Makes me quake at the thought
Of you finding me thus

Seated in a shadowy back room
At the edge of a village
Bloodied by the setting sun,
To tell me so much,
To tell me absolutely nothing.

Excerpted from Jackstrawsby Charles Simic Copyright © 2000 by Charles Simic. Excerpted by permission.
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