The Poetry of Charles Simic

Butcher Shop

Sometimes walking late at night

I stop before a closed butcher shop.
There is a single light in the store
Like the light in which the convict digs his tunnel.

An apron hangs on the hook:
The blood on it smeared into a map
Of the great continents of blood,
The great rivers and oceans of blood.

There are knives that glitter like altars
In a dark church
Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile
To be healed.

There is a wooden block where bones are broken,
Scraped clean--a river dried to its bed
Where I am fed,
Where deep in the night I hear a voice.

A Book Full of Pictures

Father studied theology through the mail
And this was exam time.
Mother knitted. I sat quietly with a book
Full of pictures. Night fell.
My hands grew cold touching the faces
Of dead kings and queens.

There was a black raincoat
      in the upstairs bedroom
Swaying from the ceiling,
But what was it doing there?
Mother's long needles made quick crosses.
They were black
Like the inside of my head just then.

The pages I turned sounded like wings.
"The soul is a bird," he once said.
In my book full of pictures
A battle raged: lances and swords
Made a kind of wintry forest
With my heart spiked and bleeding in its branches.

My Shoes

Shoes, secret face of my inner life:   

Two gaping toothless mouths,

Two partly decomposed animal skins   

Smelling of mice nests.

My brother and sister who died at birth   

Continuing their existence in you,

Guiding my life

Toward their incomprehensible innocence.

What use are books to me

When in you it is possible to read   

The Gospel of my life on earth

And still beyond, of things to come?

I want to proclaim the religion

I have devised for your perfect humility   

And the strange church I am building   

With you as the altar.

Ascetic and maternal, you endure:

Kin to oxen, to Saints, to condemned men,   

With your mute patience, forming

The only true likeness of myself.