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This Morning by Charles Simic

By T.

8 February 2011

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This Morning
Charles Simic

Enter without knocking, hard-working ant.
I’m just sitting here mulling over
What to do this dark, overcast day?
It was a night of the radio turned down low,
Fitful sleep, vague, troubling dreams.
I woke up lovesick and confused.
I thought I heard Estella in the garden singing
And some bird answering her,
But it was the rain. Dark tree tops swaying
And whispering. “Come to me my desire,”
I said. And she came to me by and by,
Her breath smelling of mint, her tongue
Wetting my cheek, and then she vanished.
Slowly day came, a gray streak of daylight
To bathe my hands and face in.
Hours passed, and then you crawled
Under the door, and stopped before me.
You visit the same tailors the mourners do,
Mr. Ant. I like the silence between us,
The quiet—that holy state even the rain
Knows about. Listen to her begin to fall,
As if with eyes closed,
Muting each drop in her wild-beating heart.

MARGINALIA

Still sick, and consoling myself with books and poems.

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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE

This poem appeared in A Wedding in Hell by Charles Simic, published by Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)

DESCRIPTION

“Simic puts chirping birds, sex, and happiness into a world of broken windows, shivering trees, soldiers, lone dogs, the homeless of the city, and a God still making up his mind.” (Source)

ABOUT CHARLES SIMIC

Charles Simic is widely recognized as one of the most visceral and unique poets writing today. His work has won numerous awards, among them the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the appointment as US poet laureate. Simic’s first poems were published in 1959, when he was 21. His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published in 1967. His book of prose poems, The… (more)