Billie Dee's
Electronic Poetry
Anthology
Charles Simic
Charles Simic, born in 1938 in Belgrade, is one of American's most prolific poets, with over 60 books. He won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for his collection of prose poems, The World Doesn't End. He currently lives in New Hampshire.
Please sign my guestbook
Paradise Motel
Millions were dead; everybody was innocent.
I stayed in my room. The President
Spoke of war as of a magic love potion.
My eyes were opened in astonishment.
In a mirror my face appeared to me
Like a twice-canceled postage stamp.
I lived well, but life was awful.
there were so many soldiers that day,
So many refugees crowding the roads.
Naturally, they all vanished
With a touch of the hand.
History licked the corners of its bloody mouth.
On the pay channel, a man and a woman
Were trading hungry kisses and tearing off
Each other's clothes while I looked on
With the sound off and the room dark
Except for the screen where the color
Had too much red in it, too much pink.
-- A Wedding in Hell, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994
The Oldest Child
The night still frightens you.
You know it is interminable
And of vast, unimaginable dimensions.
"That's because His insomnia is permanent,"
You've read some mystic say.
Is it the point of His schoolboy's compass
That pricks your heart?
Somewhere perhaps the lovers lie
Under the dark cypress trees,
Trembling with happiness,
But here there's only your beard of many days
And a night moth shivering
Under your hand pressed against your chest.
Oldest child, Prometheus
Of some cold, cold fire you can't even name
For which you're serving slow time
With that night moth's terror for company.
-- A Wedding in Hell, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1994
Pocket Theatre
Fingers in an overcoat pocket. Fingers sticking out of a black leather glove. The nails chewed raw. One play is called "Thieves' Market," another "Night in a Dime Museum." The fingers when they strip are like bewitching nude bathers or the fake wooden limbs in a cripple factory. No one ever sees the play: you put your hand in somebody else's pocket on the street and feel the action.
-- A Wedding in Hell, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994
Other Simic links:
The Cortland Review #4: Interview with Charles Simic
Oak Park Tourist: Charles Simic