From the Poetry of Charles Simic

The Miniature

One night at 4 AM while studying for an exam my eyes slipped from my text onto my breadboard and found a beauty parlor instead of last night's circuit. Twisted resistors are two hair stylists that stand in file with their scissors raised high above their heads, extensions of their outstretched arms. They wave their elbows in a twisted dance, calculating the right cut. The customers are resistors too, each of their two metallic leads bend down to their feet on the floor. The floor is covered with countless evenly-spaced square holes to vacuum hair when the floor gets knee-deep in blond and brunette. The flat black transistors make three-legged counters for the bar-bi-cide, combs, razors, and buzzers. An arch of green wire is the entrance, and the waiting room is furnished with a squat capacitor, a reception desk scattered with pens, post-it reminders, cash register, and the appointment book. In the back corridor, my mother adorns a hair drying helmet that is twenty microfarads. In the waiting room a red stripe on a resistor that represents the number 2 is a ribbon around a little girl's ponytail; she is about to get a pageboy. She rests her head on her father's knee as he reads his Time magazine and glimpses at herself in a mirror outlined in silver wire.

The chapstick conductor bellows "ALLL ABOOOOARD!" as the pencil sharpener bucks and spits steam. The little bottle of lilac perfume and her hot lover, the tiny Tabasco, grapple for their bags and dash for the departing locomotive. The dark grill on the front of the locomotive plows snow off the steel tracks and points north to Boston where the cold is in the air rather than in the hard lines of towering apartment buildings. On the front of the train there is a bright light with a black circle at its center, a window into the dark heart of the engine. The greased gears, pistons, and camshaft dance smoothly to the same tune. The tempo quickens now. Pencil shavings are wood for the coal-fired boilers and make heat for the passengers. The tall lilac woman wears an indigo sari, and her fiery man sports a green turtleneck. On the train, they pick out their seats near a window and situate their bags on the overhead rack. They sit and nuzzle each other for a while. Her small kiss finds the spot on the top of his head that tastes like vinegar. They watch the city they call home fade back into the distance.

My mother gave me an old camera that she once used to take pictures of me and my sisters when we were babies. After twenty years, the batteries aren't sold in stores anymore. In my hope to find an alternative to the batteries, I keep the camera alive on my shelf. Its strap hangs over the edge. Its apogee swings close to my bed. One stray kick in my sleep could pull it off the shelf. The camera is an opera house for common folk. They mill about in the street before the opening of the corrugated cloth shutters. Outside, a grandfather is holding his grandson's hand; they peer into the glass and follow with their eyes the two unmatched brass chandeliers decorated with translucent plastic jewels. The houselights play off that unpolished brass and are bent through the beads until they splatter the walls with dots of colored light. The families and couples are filling in their seats. The viewfinder is the balcony against the back wall. Once everyone nestles in their points of view, the houselights dim to nothing, and The Barber of Seville begins with a flash. The curtain records each scene on film. There are arias, music lessons, and blood from shaves that were too close all over the stage. The diaphragm squeezes and relaxes the lights just right for every attitude. The boy sees how musical romance is made. The clear tones, breadth, and heavenly climaxes of the opera focus his heart while his mind sharpens itself on a gear. The spectrum of place, time, and voice advances to his ear. During sleepless nights, he rifles through his junk drawer looking for those pictures.

Eight mariachi players from Mexico entertain me every night when I work late. Recently, they play me carols and O! Holy Night, but a few months ago they played the latest Latin songs as I danced salsa. They are the most talented group of skeletons in penguin-patterned nun tunics complete with rosary necklaces and dangling crosses I have ever heard. They stand in a line defying death with their upbeat smiles. Their skull faces show their love for performing together. This octet is timeless entertainment like metaphysics. Their spacious black eyes are eerie invitations to the world inside a hollow skull. They play horns with no lips; they pluck strings with raw finger bones. Music is their vitality. Their prophetic gestures cast spells of possibility. The trumpet player, the runt of the eight, arches his back as he bends his tender, brassy note, as a red tear dribbles from his black eye socket. Between numbers they break and talk about what it is like to get their palms read in hell.

I've constructed some of the shelves in my room out of wood boards and right angle pieces of metal. On the shelf above my bed, where my head goes when I lie down, there are two candles, a dried rose, and an incense holder. The incense holder I also made myself out of a foot long piece of wood. A groove is carved in the top to hold the ashes when they fall, and a hole was drilled so the incense would protrude at an angle that says two o'clock. Incense does not burn into nothing; it leaves behind its core piece of wood, an oversized splinter, and ashes. Chinese musk is burned constantly to hide the stink of college life, mainly neglected hygiene and dirty laundry. But now the spirit of the incense has been spent. A gangplank for the Santa Maria remains. The crew clomped their way up the inclined plank onto the square-rigger without even a breath of mutiny. The ship is long gone. The bridge between land and the unknown points and ends and waits for the next brave daydreamer to come along and walk its length holding onto the rail made of rope. Spiders build webs on the plank. Black widows suck the blood from flies and warn against knowing too much.

The Mythic

The builder of the sculpture in the Avenue B Community Gardens between 5th street and 6th street is a staple of this neighborhood. Most people know him through his sculpture, that is anchored on a ten by ten foot plot of garden space. The inexact underlying structure is built of scrap lumber, rarely cut to the right size. People come from all over to stare and wonder how junk can climb and hang so strong. It's ugliness and audacity are its majesty; it could be a throne for a god or an observer's personal pyramid. It is impossible to pass without inspiring wonder. It begs for questions. Why did he build that? Who could possibly do this? Why in this garden? The tower started as a rectangular landfill, was carefully sorted, and then raised up in a careful arrangement so it won't fall and hurt anyone, but there are no guarantees of that. The builder hammers into his lanky spires and cross beams Barbie and Ken, the head of a plastic clown, a sexy lamp shade, the arms of a broken futon, a decrepit telephone booth, a bald tire, a rubber iguana, a two-wheeled baby carriage. From them, he hangs beach balls, violins, a wooden airplane with a long black nose, three horses from a merry-go-round, a meat hook, maps of the new world, a plastic tiger. There is no more subterranean decay. The earth holds out this ode to junk with pride. Summer sun bleaches everything. Wind threatens decapitation. Rain dissolves the soluble stuff and allows for mixing. The tower lasts.

I read on my fire escape during summer. From there, I watch the neighborhood activity. From the day I moved into five-twelve east fifth, I noticed a quiet crazy with deep set eyes, scraggly hair walking with a limp like he owned the block. I could see his roots in the place I found new, and I immediately was curious about his story. He walked kilted over to one side a little bit, his shoulders sauntered in tune with his hips. His lower lip protruded to the right and exposed his tiny lower teeth aligned squarely complementing his large dented angular head. He had thick black plastic frames, browned shoulders, cut-off shorts, leather criss-cross sandals. He humped his little pot belly along when he walked. I whispered "Hello" to him one day because his wild look drove me mad with curiosity, but he just stared at me, followed me with his eyes, watched me turn up avenue A toward school. He walked two Dalmatians at least twice a day. He never went anywhere. As far as I could tell, he obeyed no clock. I noticed that his portrait was painted on the metal sheets that are pulled down nightly to protect the windows of the corner pharmacy. The portrait showed only his pale face, wide lips, deep eyes. He was in the foreground, staring right at me, and there were two men wearing red and blue motley that looked exactly like the snuggies I hated wearing as a kid. I met his dead level stare, devoid of cordiality and walked to my door wondering what made him so great.

One day I saw him take a chair from a woman who was wrestling it along the concrete sidewalk. He swung it over his head. The chair had been thrown out, but it was still good so she was dragging it home. He walked with his head stuck in the seat of the chair as she gave him directions to her building.

A summer later, I strolled up Avenue B and came upon the speechless guardian sitting at the open gate of the community gardens. He was stripped to the waist. Purple and gold Mardi Gras necklaces did loops around his neck. He cracked open his eyes and said, "There's a tiger in the garden."

The Mathematics

Many More Zeros (by Amelia Wentworth)

This is the last rotten zero at the market.
This zero spit itself out under a carriage wheel.
How many zeros did I see last night shimmying and drinking cocktails on the roof of a high rise?
This little zero starved to death.
All that's left of that zero is a soot mark on the wall.
How many zeros come out with a Q-tip?
You weren't thinking of trying to get there with your grandmother's poppet-bead necklace?
Every time you look at me your glasses fog up and I don't believe a word you say.
You'll know the boiling point when she tells you to go to zero, to go jump in a zero.
Did you ever try one deviled?
Its little yolk has a digit inside of it, imagine that!
This is my math poem, and I'm dedicating it to you.
If you look closely at the little silver bubble of your saliva you'll see your date of birth engraved.
On the assembly line toward infinity, workers poke and add to the zeros on the conveyor belt.

I was introduced to zero in the second grade when I tried to catch a bird in a box. I put a stick under one edge of the box and sprinkled seed on the grass as bait. I tied a long string to the base of the stick, and hid under a bush so I could jerk the stick out from under the box to catch my bird. After what could have been no more than one hour, I learned the meaning of zero bird.

On the scale of gods and devils, zero stands out as an inverted infinity. It has many meanings, most of which are incomprehensible without some philosophical rhetoric. In the small grades, I remember that memorizing the multiplication table for zero was easy; everything multiplied by zero came out zero. Further along I learned that any number divided by zero came out to be a really big number that began to look like infinity which is not a beast of the numeric species. Infinity was and still is an answer that I give without asking too many questions because it exists on the brink of comprehension. Zero, on the other hand, is dependable, always amounting to nothing. All empty space fits into an ant-sized "o". A zero holds what is compressible until it has no dimension.

So what is so big about zero? Zero fathers symmetry in mathematics. It mirrors the positive into the negative. Try describing a set of objects without first understanding what it is to not have the set of objects. The addition in one space often means the taking away in another space. Zero is the place where addition and subtraction annihilate. In language, zero is the pivot on which our infinite realm of possibility and our finite reality swing. We live in each realm and often neglect what holds them together, their common point. What genius to articulate what is not there gathered into a solitary symbol. Zero turns back on itself and bites its own tail. It has a tendency to roll away.

The Micrometer

One of the first things that intrigued me about Charles Simic's work was the presence of the miniature. In his book Hotel Insomnia, there are countless spiders and droplets of blood. In his poem "Watch Repair", Simic celebrates the miniature when he looks at the gears of a watch and finds splinters of arctic starlight. In the tiny-scaled microcosm, he imagines "Tiny golden mills/Grinding invisible/Coffee beans". In the poem "Drawing the Triangle", Simic starts with "I reserve the triangle/For the wee hours,/The chigger-sized hours." Human beings are scared of things they cannot see. To achieve a greater darkness, Simic employs the horrifying vision of the very small. His new book, Jackstraws, is infested with insects. In the poem "The Soul Has Many Brides" a fly is seen "...shamelessly crawling up/One of Buddha's nostrils" in an Indian temple. In "The Common Insects of North America," a Simic narrator ends the poem with the comical "...Widow Dragonfly/Doing leg splits could use a pair of/Eentsy-weentsy prescription shades/Before she comes to a dreadful end." "At dusk a firefly or two/Doused its eye pits," in the "Head of a Doll". In the poem, "On the Meadow," "one or two ants/may have tumbled on their backs/as we sit here on the porch./Their feet are peddling/Imaginary bicycles." In the same poem, the narrator wonders about the ants "If anyone's coming to their aid/Bringing cake crumbs/Miniature editions of the Bible." Simic lives in the world of the flea circus; he delights in the surprise that a recognizable life goes on at a smaller scale. Not only does he see the struggle to survive in these tiny creatures but also the macabre comedy of death.

Simic is not a realist, but he creates mythical worlds in which things transpire realistically. Simic's characters thrive in their madness, and their madness is attractive to us. The madness of a Simic bag lady never seems contrived, but rather extremely possible in its shocking humor and reality. Not only are his character traits believable, but the relationships between his characters are grounded in the world we experience. One reason Simic is an adept inventor of character is that he is able to see them from a lucid distance. There is no cracking into the code of a character's mind. It is always a lonely narrator seeing and experiencing a lonely character who exists within the power of his own mythic solitude. In Simic's The Book of Gods and Devils, we meet many characters, both gods and devils on the streets of New York City. In "Fourteenth Street Poem," we get to share a secret with "The bag lady who shouted/She was Venus/The goddess of love!/Had two front tooth missing." In "The Initiate," we come across a couple of saints. "St. John of the Cross wore dark glasses/As he passed me on the street./St. Theresa of Avila, beautiful and grave,/Turned her back on me." Even objects have the potential to become gods or devils in the Simic poem. In "The White Room," the narrator questions: "Gods disguising themselves/As black hairpins? A hand-mirror?/A comb with a tooth missing?" Simic wants order from the disappointing and chaotic world around him. To do this, he assigns character or object the role of good or evil, god or devil. He loves to sit back and entertain himself with the little amphitheaters of his poems.

The idea of zero is the ear which Simic uses to eavesdrop on the flirtation between the infinitely possible and the fact of everyday. In "Many Zeros", "The teacher rises voiceless before a class/Of pale, tight-lipped children./The blackboard behind him as black as the sky/Light-years from the earth." Simic draws himself out of the young potential of the classroom by allowing himself to follow the black nothingness of the blackboard into empty outer space. "It's the silence the teacher loves,/The taste of the infinite in it./The stars like teeth marks on children's pencils./Listen to it, he says happily." At his imagined infinity, Simic mixes senses. To create the believable trip to infinity, he allows silence to fill his imagination.

Other sites: poets.org, some Simic poems, The Wooden Toy