Simic, Charles

Yugoslavia / United States, (b. 1938)

Butcher Shop

  1. Sometimes walking late at night
  2. I stop before a closed butcher shop.
  3. There is a single light in the store
  4. Like the light in which the convict digs his tunnel.
  5.  
  6. An apron hangs on the hook:
  7. The blood on it smeared into a map
  8. Of the great continents of blood,
  9. The great rivers and oceans of blood.
  10.  
  11. There are knives that glitter like altars
  12. In a dark church
  13. Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile
  14. To be healed.
  15.  
  16. There’s wooden block where bones are broken,
  17. Scraped clean—a river dried to its bed
  18. Where I am fed,
  19. Where deep in the night I hear a voice.

Editor’s Note:
In a 2005 interview by Mark Ford for the Paris Review Simic described Butcher Shop as:

“It was the first poem I wrote that I knew I wanted to keep. I wrote it in 1963, when I was living on East Thirteenth Street. In those days there were still Polish and Italian butcher shops in that part of town with wonderful displays of sausages, pig knuckles, slaughtered lambs and chickens. I never in my life went past a butcher shop like that without stopping to take a close look. Of course, it reminded me of Europe, of my childhood. I slaughtered chickens when I was a boy, saw pigs have their throats slit and then be butchered afterwards.”

© Charles Simic. What the Grass Says: Poems. San Francisco: Kayak Press (1967).

Tapestry

  1. It hangs from heaven to earth.
  2. There are trees in it, cities, rivers,
  3. small pigs and moons. In one corner
  4. the snow falling over a charging cavalry,
  5. in another women are planting rice.
  6.  
  7. You can also see:
  8. a chicken carried off by a fox,
  9. a naked couple on their wedding night,
  10. a column of smoke,
  11. an evil-eyed woman spitting into a pail of milk.
  12.  
  13. What is behind it?
  14. —Space, plenty of empty space.
  15.  
  16. And who is talking now?
  17. —A man asleep under his hat.
  18.  
  19. What happens when he wakes up?
  20. —He’ll go into a barbershop.
  21. They’ll shave his beard, nose, ears, and hair,
  22. To make him look like everyone else.

© Charles Simic. Charles Simic: Selected Early Poems. New York: George Braziller Inc. (1999).

Back at the Chicken Shack

  1. What I need is a seraph and a pig.
  2. The pig to eat and the seraph to ask questions.
  3. I suffer hugely. Of all matters heavenly,
  4. I’m suspicious, ornery, deeply mistrustful.
  5. All I know is what Euclid says.
  6.  
  7. We are strolling in our Sunday rags.
  8. We are tipping our hats to the Great Nothing,
  9. Snapping our fireman’s suspenders….
  10. When the ladies come into view
  11. In their light summer dresses, carrying parasols.
  12. It must be ten below zero.
  13. They seem to be laughing at us.
  14. One of them has fallen back and is praying.
  15. The sky is the color of pitch.
  16. Not even one star out tonight.
  17.  
  18. I think the pig knows what’s in store for him,
  19. Your excellency. You ought to talk to him.
  20. He ought to talk to you.
  21. I assume you have an important message for all of us
  22. When you come. In the meantime,
  23. The large butchering knife on the table
  24. And that woman praying in the galactic wind.
  25.  
  26. I sat and sat peering into the gloom,
  27. And then I remembered the mirrors,
  28. All the many kinds such a big city can contain,
  29. Dimming, dimming…
  30. Trying to catch one last glint of each other—
  31. And that calmed me down.

© Charles Simic. Poetry. October/November 1987, Vol. CLI, Nos. 1-2.

About the Poet:

Charles Simic (also known as Dušan Simić), Yugoslavia / United States, (b. 1938), is a poet, educator, translator, editor, essayist and former co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. He graduated from New York University in 1967, after attending night school there and at the University of Chicago.

Among his many awards are a MacArthur Fellowship from 1984-1989, several Pulitzer-Prize nominations, and a 1990 Pulitzer Prize. Simic has held a variety of academic posts. He is professor emeritus of American literature and creative writing at University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973.

He was appointed the 15th Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007. Simic has also been incredibly prolific translator. He has translated the work of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian and Slovenian poets, including Tomaz Salamun and Vasko Popa. He translated and edited the anthology The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry (1992), regarded as the premier introduction to that country’s contemporary poetry. [DES-01/22]

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