Charles Simic (#poem)

 

Watermelons

Green Buddhas

On the fruit stand.

We eat the smile

And spit out the teeth.

Venus

The well-lit,

All-night drugstore

In the sky

Open for business

Something, please,

Miss,

To ease my fear

Of the dark.

She, not looking up,

Busy

Measuring

Into a vial

Drop after drop

Of that clear

Odorless drug,

They call infinity.

Further Adventures of Charles Simic

Is our Charles Simic afraid of death?

Yes, Charles Simic is afraid of death.

Does he kneel and pray for eternal life?

No, he's busy drawing a valentine with a crayon.

Pale as a freshly chopped onion,

He goes over the wrongs he committed.

His conscience, does it bother him much?

Only when he lies down to get a night's rest.

The hellfires, does he feel them closing in?

No, but he hears the hounds barking.

Does he lift his eyes humbly in forgiveness?

Her love was his judge, her wrath the jury.

Some dark night, praying to the Lord above,

His own tongue will slash his throat.

-Charles Simic

After Charles Simic passed away a couple of weeks ago (Jan. 9), I pulled the book off the shelf and have been making my way through it again. These are a couple that caught my eye on this rereading. (I haven't yet finished it.)

Simic (1938-2023) was born in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, now Serbia, and moved to the U.S. as a teenager in in 1954. He won a Pulitzer for poetry as well as various other awards, and was made the U.S. poet laureate in 2007. (A two-year term, I think, at that point.) 

'Watermelons' is from his book Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk. (1974)

'Venus' is from They Forage at Night. (1980)

'Further Adventures of Charles Simic' is from Biography and a Lament. (1976)

Yeats' Politics (#poem)

 

Politics

'In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.'

-Thomas Mann

How can I, that girl standing there,

My attention fix

On Roman or on Russian

Or on Spanish politics?

Yet here's a travelled man that knows

What he talks about,

And there's a politician

That has read and thought,

And maybe what they say is true

Of war and war's alarms,

But O that I was young again

And held her in my arms!

-W. B. Yeats

In case you didn't guess 😉 this is from the 1930s, late in Yeats' career, and shows up in Last Poems. I assume we're meant to identify the 'travelled man' as Mann, then living in exile. While there aren't so many politicians who have both 'read and thought,' I have no idea who, if anybody in particular, that's meant to be.

I'm still dodging writing about Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus. Quoting a poem that Hazzard has a character quote in the book is a trick I pulled before, and here am I doing it again. Christian Thrale, who's in the British foreign service, remembers the first four lines as he's about to embark on an affair with his secretary. She does end up in his arms. His wife is Grace Thrale (née Bell), one of the two sisters at the heart of the book.

  

Ngaio Marsh's Death at the Bar

"If thurr's not a corpse on the premises afore long, I'll be greatly astonished."

Don't you worry...

Abel Pomeroy is the proprietor at The Plume of Feathers and he's got a rat problem. He goes off to buy rat poison, but the ordinary stuff is not in stock; the pharmacist has only got the extra strong. But that's not a problem for Pomeroy: he's got a plan. Locked cabinet, gloves, whatever it takes to keep it safe.

Well, you know how that goes. By the time the lawyer Luke Watchman is dead, we've got a good half-dozen suspects lined up: two beneficiaries under his will, a girl who previously had an affair with Watchman, young Will Pomeroy who's in love with the girl, the cousin of a man whom Watchman sent to prison, and the mysterious Legge, whom Watchman knows from somewhere, but nobody's saying where. 

The murder takes place on the coast of Devon, and the local police officials are good, but not good enough. Abel Pomeroy wants this solved, it's ruining his business. So Roderick Alleyn and his trusty assistant Br'er Fox are sent to have a look:

"Yes, look at the colour of the sea, you old devil. Smell that jetty-tar-and-iodine smell, blast your eyes. Fox, murder or no murder, I'm glad we came."

Me, too, Mr. Alleyn. 

It's the ninth in the series and dates from 1940. It's a pretty good entry, though I preferred the opening drollery about the poison; the unwinding of events I think could have been clearer. But in just now looking at the date, I realized this was the one I meant to save for the 1940 Club in April. Oh, well...

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Bottle of Poison. Yup, there's definitely a bottle of poison in this one...