In his hands
an accordion spreads its wings
like an eagle over its prey,
exposing its white, puffed-up chest.
An apple is placed on the boy’s head
as on the head of every boy in town—
half-rotten apples await a paternity test.
And the fathers
lose their strength
long before shooting the arrow.
Everyone grows old at the same time,
clipped by the same gardener’s hand.
The middle generation does not exist.
They migrate,
and when they return,
they have gray hair and build a big gray house
where they’ll breathe their last.
But winter is always a good time for apple trees.
Apples everywhere—apples have no memory
and yet, as in Genesis,
they keep playing the temptation game
here, where there is no paradise to lose.
Indifferent wives open windows
and let the nights escape
as if unleashing dogs
on a street that stinks of rotting apples
or maybe cedars.
ACUPUNCTURE
Among the personal objects inside a 2100-year-old Chinese tomb,
archaeologists found nine acupuncture needles,
four gold and five silver.
Long before knowing why,
ancient doctors knew that pain
must be fought with pain.
It’s quite simple: an array of needles pricking your arm
for a properly functioning heart and lungs.
Needles in the feet to ease insomnia and stress.
Needles between your eyes to fight infertility.
A little pain here,
and the effect is felt elsewhere.
Once, a group of explorers set out to plant a flag on the South Pole,
a needle at the heel of the globe, in the middle of nowhere.
But before the mission was completed
a new world war had begun.
The impact of the needle was felt in the world’s brain,
in the lobe responsible for short-term memory.
When Russia used ideology as acupuncture—a needle over the Urals—
it impacted the pancreas and the control of blood sugar:
America paid tenfold for whiskey during Prohibition,
and at post offices, copies of Joyce’s
“immoral” Ulysses were stored for burning.
The universe functions as a single body. Stars form lines of needles
carefully pinned to a broad hairy back.
Their impact is felt in the digestive tract, each day
a new beginning. How can you begin a new day
not having fully absorbed yesterday’s protein?
I was a child when my first teacher
mispronounced my last name twice. That pricked me like a needle.
A small needle in the earlobe. And suddenly,
my vision cleared—
I saw poetry,
the perfect disguise.
FIRST WEEK OF RETIREMENT
This time of day, light spills from window ledges
like wine from chins at a bacchanal.
He was a general. But the man in the mirror is simply a soldier
waiting for his superior’s signal
to zip the tent shut.
From the kitchen, the smell of something burning.
The daily newspaper, unopened, yellows on the couch.
And the cat, a stray cat in heat,
meows under the window.
God knows why the cat chooses to cry in his yard
filled with empty bottles and cassette-tape ribbons.
And only God knows why a sales agent
knocks on his door day after day
trying to sell him a Japanese knife set.
Damn cat! He shoved her once with his foot,
yet she still cries, this time on his roof.
And the sales agent won’t leave:
“You get a free shaving kit with the knives!
You can’t beat a deal like this!”
A nervous hand slides over his woundless body.
Nowhere to rest it. No sign as to when the weather might change.
“What the hell should I do with seventeen knives?!”
Does this sales agent who, like a cat,
can’t distinguish red from green,
know that only a week ago
he led thousands of men
and that he had more stars pinned to his uniform
A general during peacetime,
waiting for a war that never happened.
Everything under control, functional
like an electric shaver. A bonus.
But … where is life itself?
Where are the knives?
A CONVERSATION WITH CHARLES SIMIC
Las Vegas. In a bar. A hybrid light half-red, half-orange
highlights vague parentheses on people’s faces. Wrinkles.
I am sitting next to Charles Simic.
His last name is pronounced differently
in his new language than in his mother tongue;
the final consonants hardened along the way
like cardboard boxes drenched on the deck of a ship
only to dry again under another sun.
Someone is wiping beer foam from his beard.
You can’t tell if it’s already dark outside.
A nervous figure in the corner keeps trying his luck
on a machine, waiting for change to fall out.
And the music—
the music forms large air bubbles
under the skin.
We are both from the Balkans. Our countries are separated by mountains,
which seen from above look peaceful like dozing elephants.
They take short naps. Because of their weight,
their bodies never find rest
and they turn from one side to the other
making it impossible for them
to all dream at the same time.
We chatted. Perhaps he spoke about literature, religion,
politics … perhaps.
It was terribly noisy. Impossible to follow a conversation.
So I only followed the timbre of his voice,
the deep, mature, inner timbre congested with calcium,
like drops of water falling from cave ceilings to the ground,
from earth to earth
the shortest journey for sound
but the longest
for us mortals.
THE BUSINESS OF DYING
People can tolerate everything—
theft, violence, injustice, murder …
But not suicide.
The one who killed himself broke the rules of the game,
ignoring the script
and everyone else’s long waiting line.
His clothes weren’t given away to the neighbors
and of course weren’t burned. Burning them would release
the arrogant cloud of his Scottish fabric into the air.
“He was a coward,” someone said loudly.
“He was brave,” another said quietly. The rest
simply memorized a new flavor of death
on their tongues without swallowing
like a sommelier her wine.
Only a scrap of paper left behind,
written clearly, without secrets, no innuendos or pauses,
ending with “I die” as a causative verb. A grammatical terror;
he has just robbed them of mourning, the marinating salt
that could help them bear another six months of hibernation.
Some forgot to lock their gates that night
and dogs hardly barked.
Fear retreated, like periodontal disease
revealing the roots beneath gums.
They suddenly found themselves alone
and entirely insignificant.
Among other things, he had picked the wrong time: November,
when the body becomes paranoid of itself,
bleeding a dark coppery sweat from the same spot
(nobody owed him that either).
This is how suicide turns into a natural monument.
METALLIC
1.
We knew nothing back then about Santa,
but we knew Hasije, the ice cream vendor.
We’d press against the counter and before our eyes
a plump goddess out of Titian’s vision appeared.
With a large wooden ladle, she scooped the ice cream
from the mixing machine into a stainless-steel pot.
We knew the number of beauty marks on her forearm
better than we knew the number of years we had lived.
When she put down the ladle, a storm of jangling coins
would blow to her face.
The tallest were the lucky ones;
the short ones were only coins that spun
as if hypnotized, and ended up forced into a corner.
No one ever saw Hasije
open or close the shop.
But the drivers of transport trucks
confirmed that they stopped by for an espresso at dawn,
and late in the evenings, for cognac and a smoke.
“Impossible!” one of us protested.
To see Hasije, her icy-Saturnalian ring,
her sleeves rolled up to her armpits,
was a dream for us.
And just as a dream turns to smoke in the last instant,
some days when it was my turn, she shouted in a metallic voice:
“That’s it. The ice cream’s finished!”
And: “I said, that’s it! No more for today!”
But nobody would move.
And from the back of the line, the spinning coins
would turn aggressive and plea:
“One ice cream, teta!”*
Because to those at the end of the line, to the powerless,
bad news is merely gossip,
and behind empty pots
a goddess becomes twice the goddess she was.
Many years later I returned
and asked about Hasije and the only ice cream shop in town.
They said the poor woman had a tumor
and couldn’t survive it.
This is how it had to happen.
Local legends have only two options:
they must either flee, or die,
so we’ll have a clean past to talk about.
2.
The hospital’s prostate hall smells of watermelon,
the cheapest fruit of the season.
He lifts his arm and presses a button.
“What’s wrong?” inquires the half body of a nurse through the doorway.
Nothing. It’s the visiting hour.
His feet are icy cold.
In classical drama, his name would be King Lear.
But in real life he’s simply someone
who rarely looks at the door.
Today’s a holiday, when women
used to wash the doorsteps with lime
and children returned home late, cheeks bursting red
from watching turkey fights.
Grounded as punishment,
they’d wipe their running noses on their sleeves,
and when they pressed their eyes to their knees,
they’d see a vision of an amber desert
without people.
And, by the way, he once had two little girls
(or three?), to whom he’d tell the bedtime story
of the migrating swans, the only one he knew.
But, as usual, at the wrong moment,
the hospital food cart brings the other
half of the nurse into the room.
“Are you ready? I brought soup and peas!”
She enters without knocking. No one knocks here.
First of all, you need a door to knock on.
And to have a door, you need a woman’s finger
with a fake diamond ring on it
and a metallic voice: “Quick, get up, you’re late for work!”
*
*Teta: an Albanian term used by children to refer to adult women.
THE BODY’S DELAY
Really, they say, it was her bottles of perfume,
her hesitation to leave Versailles without her favorite fragrances
(when horses neighed danger in the courtyard),
that cost Marie Antoinette her life—
a brief delay that changed history.
One trip my luggage
arrived in Dublin two days after me.
My underwear, size-seven shoes, toiletries,
hair dryer, nightgown, Valium,
novel with dog-eared pages,
and the medium-petite dresses,
revolving alone on empty conveyor belts
at the wrong airports.
The body is slow, clumsy; it rarely surprises you.
It takes you to places
your imagination has explored
long in advance.
And you may falsely believe
that when you’re young, healthy, and beautiful,
the body leads the way.
Remember how often it’s been abandoned,
like a supporting actor on the red carpet
dismissed by cameras.
Clumsy, yet sly,
the body hunts for the moment when it can catch up with you.
So it was in my moments of hesitation
when my children were born. And my garden expanded
with other seasons, signposts, fences,
along with other dilemmas.
And just when you believe that it is clumsier than ever,
heavier from age, sclerotic, stuck in arterial traffic,
precisely at that point
does the body lead the way.
Because the body has no nostalgia.
And you’re the one left behind like a pillar of salt
when there’s nothing left to worship.
TWO BY TWO
He grew up in a small town by the water,
where people answer a question
with another question.
Long summers, rebellious without cause,
and along the river’s edge, leaves graying like sideburns.
On Sundays, four women wash clothes
in the river, slapping their men’s shirts on the rocks.
Four reflections imitate the actions,
taking revenge on husbands who don’t exist.
Lost, at the edge of the water, a confused child
listens to his mother calling and doesn’t respond—
isolation an artifact that can’t be reproduced.
His father cuts his hair in the yard without a mirror
on one of those days when he’s in a good mood
and the sophism of grapes distills on the tongue.
His scissors make no mistakes;
they clean up carefully around the ears, above the eyes
(this was the whole point anyway).
Sitting on the chair, his feet hanging without touching the ground,
the boy feels safe. The future cannot find him here
the way a dog can’t pick up someone’s scent in water.
Clepsydra, the one who measures time,
has no favorites among her clients.
At night, the voice of the river is totalitarian
like his father’s alcoholic breath
that blows against his neck after a haircut.
And he doesn’t dare look back at what he did.
His vision doubles: two pasts,
two versions of the truth,
two women to fall in love with,
two lives to escape.
Who is the reflection of whom?
GLOVES
I am leaving this Park Central Hotel room on Seventh Avenue.
I switch the lights off and my eyes search for the window. Like a surgical mask,
it’s hard to pluck a smile from the reflection, or a hint of compassion, a farewell.
In a few minutes, a deluge of cleaning staff will take over:
mops, detergents, clean sheets, the acidic accent of the language they speak,
the electric vacuum whose metropolitan appetite
sucks three days out of my life in mere seconds.
They wear yellow plastic gloves. The same color gloves
a woman who cleans my colleague’s office uses,
along with the seven types of detergents: for bacteria, skin cells, notes,
telephone calls, aspirations, and mainly, for his name.
No one called him by name.
A name, though, has a very mild freezing point;
it can only be smothered for a short time.
And as you leave the plane, the yellow gloves enter from another door.
Sterilization grows even more powerful here:
seats disinfected after long intercontinental nights
(a fact never included in biographies)
and headphones after movies watched over the ocean.
The nurse changing an intravenous line in the hospital
appears a little more human.
Her gloves are opaque. With her eyes on the patient’s electrocardiogram,
she waits quietly for the hills on the screen to iron out.
Behind tears, the patient’s nephew
hides a wicked joy—
the leather armchair that faces the garden.
Hygiene, hygiene, hygiene.
How quickly the world hurries to clean up every trace!
Remnants are events only to an archaeologist:
he doesn’t require gloves to handle a five-thousand-year-old skeletal jaw.
There’s no risk of infection. And no hesitation
in my mother’s ponderous narrative
and dry-cleaned voice: “What’s done is done.”
Some call it “universal detergent,” while others simply “time.”
And yet, pay attention to the instructions: “Keep out of reach of children!”
I CAME, I SAW, I LEFT …
Hunched inside a forty-five-degree corner,
eyes glued to the cartoons
on the TV screen, the light
projecting onto his face.
He could be a statue in the park
though not exactly. This is my father
who has chosen the expression I’ll remember him by
for the rest of my life.
No one expects anything from him.
He might continue to sit like that
for another million years,
a fossil inside amber,
surrounded by forgetfulness and forgiveness.