National Poetry Month With Charles Simic


For some it's fingernails scratched across
a blackboard revives the dead. For others
it's mere mention of it that startles walls
and makes windows wince. For my mother
it was chewing or the threat of chewing ice cubes
whenever I had a cup full of them. For me all it takes
to set my teeth on edge and give me goose bumps
is a Charles Simic poem. Today it's the one where
greyheaded old men wander their rooms like
schoolchildren. It's a gloomy little poem that draws
you into its doomed kitchens where an entire
generation has lost their way like their fathers
before them and for whom night has become
an empty class, the teacher's last chalk line
almost erased. It has just the right amount
of truth and sad. Its heartbeat is otherworldly.

Once you've read it you never quite think
the same way again about loneliness or
forgetfulness, a glass of water, or even
your own exiled fathers who begin to inhabit
its stanzas until all you can see are their
thirsty shadows roaming the campus.

Oh Charlie, if you only knew the bad dreams
I've had after reading you, how good it feels
to finally wake up and fix a hearty breakfast
for those in my house who still love to eat,
I could almost kiss each of your books for
containing such sustaining nightmares. On
my shelves they gleam like jewels sewn
into winter coats from war-torn Belgrade
smuggled across the sea to America
to safety. They make April that much
crueler when it's over and our native
English sounds mundane as cornfields  
against the childhood accent you never 
lost, your aging genius lingering 
as a fine wine in our foreign tongue.





Blackboard


I don't want to become one
of those gray-haired
schoolteachers who ends up
taking her blood pressure
twice an hour and listening for
mice in the aged cheddar traps.

First I think I'll henna my hair
red with an Egyptian rinse
a friend just brought back
from her exotic travels
to Wallgreens, and then,
and then, I'll grab
a coke from the fridge
for one dead father
and a Heineken for the other

and even though it's a moonless night
look out the window for the moon
shining on a scratchy line I’ve drawn
between them on the sidewalk
with a piece of blue chalk.
I'm only ten so they can never
cross except to shake hands
and forget they're ghosts,
watch the blue line glow
in my poem and disintegrate
their afflictions in the dark.
I'll drink to that. Bottoms up!





If This Falls


upwind of the woodpecker,
if it falls 
from the branch tops 
onto a bed 
of wintered-over 
grass and sinks
downhill, 
if it trills on 
then stops, 
trills and stops clear 
and loud as ice 
breaking in lake water, 
at its own pace, 
running its own 
course like snow 
melting to the unsung
tune of the earth,
or the blue sugar
a child sees dissolving
in her dog’s eyes
when he dies, 
if there is only 
the bird
knocking 
at the door of its new home 
like a woman tapping out lines, 
remembering Ruthie
on the school bus
who said her dog’s eyes 
looked like blue sugar  
as she dictated
her first poem to you
and you swooned
to a twinkling of urgency
a twinkling of authenticity,
will it register a sound 
to anyone else
thirty-odd years later
worth its weight
in sweet and salt?