Painters of Angels and Seraphim, and: Ever So Tragic, and: Muttering Perhaps, or Humming, and: Birthday Star Atlas

PAINTERS OF ANGELS AND SERAPHIM /Charles Simic After a long lunch of roast lamb And many glasses of heavy red wine, I fell asleep in a rowboat That I never got around to untie From its mooring under the willows That went on fussing over my head As if to make the shade even deeper. I woke once to pull my shirt off, And once when I heard my name Called by a woman, distant and worried, Since it was past sundown, The water reflecting the dark hills, And the sky of that chilly blue That used to signify a state of grace. The Missouri Review · 75 EVER SO TRAGIC / Charles Simic Heart—as in Latin popsongs Blaring from the poolhall radio. The air had thickened, the evening air. He took off his white shirt. The heart, one could mark it With lipstick on bare chest, The way firingsquad commanders mark it. He was reading in the papers About the artificial heart— The same plastic they use for wind-up toys, She thought. More likely Like an old wheelbarrow to push: Heart of stone, knife-grinder's Stone . . . Later It was raining and they got into bed. O desire, o futile hope, o sighs! In coalminer's pit and lantern: The heart, the bright red heart . . . Didn't the blind man just call His little dog that? Hearts make haste, hasten on! 76 · The Missouri Review MUTTERING PERHAPS, OR HUMMING / Charles Simic I avidly read the classics In a dirty little milltown, The weather of the soul turning Bitter. My brain, it seemed, Constructed by Daedalus, I was Lost hopelessly at the entrance Of the maze while spooning My bowl of breakfast cereal In company of nightwatchmen, Highschool dropouts thinking of A career in the army. The gods Looked like hairdressers for dead Lovers. I made myself learn Their names so I could rename AU my neighbors, even the ugly Ones biting on bad cigars. Afternoons I lazied with a woman In a place with shades drawn. We played cards in the nude, made Love on all fours. I wanted some Herodotus to remember us briefly Before describing the high and mighty Dining on nightingale tongues Chez the Gorgons, the fashionable ones. The Missouri Review · 77 BIRTHDAY STAR ATLAS / Charles Simic Wildest dream, Miss Emily, Then the coldly dawning suspicion— Always at the loss—come day Large black birds overtaking men who sleep in ditches. A whiff of winter in the air. Sovereign blue, Blue that stands for intellectual clarity Over a street deserted except for a far off dog, A police car, a light at the vanishing point For the children to solve on the blackboard today— Blind children at the school you and I know about. Their gray nightgowns creased by the north wind; Their fingernails bitten from time immemorial. We're in a long line outside a dead letter office. We're dustmice under a conjugal bed carved with exotic fishes and monkeys. We're in a slow drifting coalbarge huddled around the television set Which has a wire coat-hanger for an antenna. A quick view (by satellite) of the polar regions Maternally tucked in for the long night. Then some sort of interference—parallel lines Like the ivory-boned needles of your grandmother knitting our fates together. All things ambigious and lovely in their ambiguity, Like the nebulae in my new star atlas— Pale ovals where the ancestral portraits have been taken down. The gods with their goatees and their faint smiles In company of their bombshell spouses, Naked and statuesque as if entering a death camp. They smile, too, stroke the Triton wrapped around the mantle clock 78 · The Missouri Review When they are not showing the whites of their eyes in theatrical ecstasy. Nostalgias for the theological vaudeville. A false springtime cleverly painted on cardboard For the couple in the last row to sigh over While holding hands which unknown to them Flutter like bird-shaped scissors . . . Emily, the birthday atlas! I kept turning its pages awed And delighted by the size of the unimaginable; The great nowhere, the everlasting nothing— Pure and serene doggedness For the hell of it—and love, Our...