Y EL ÓBOLO BAJO LA LENGUA

BROOMS

5

And the finally there´s your grandmother

Sweeping the dust of the nineteenth century

Into the twentieth, and your grandfather plucking

A straw our of the broom to pick his teeth.

Long winter nights.

Dawns a thousand years deep.

Kitchen windows like heads

Bandaged for toothache.

The broom beyond them sweeping,

Tucking the lucent grans of dust

Into neat pyramids,

That have tombs in them,

Already sacked by robbers

Once, long ago

Charles Simic

Y EL ÓBOLO BAJO LA PUERTA

BROOMS

4

The secret teaching of brooms

Excludes optimism, the consolation

Of laziness, the astonishing wonders

Of a glass of aged moonshine.

It says: the bones end up under the table.

Bread-crumbs have a mind of the their own.

The milk is you-know-who´s semen.

The mice have the last squeal.

As for the famous business

Of levitation, I suggest remembering:

The is only one God

And his prophet is Mohammed.

Charles Simic

Y EL ÓBOLO BAJO LA LENGUA

BROOMS

3

In this and in no other manner

Was the first ancestral broom made:

Namely, they plucked all the arrows

From the bent back os Saint Sebastian.

They tied them with a rope

On which Judas hung himself.

Stuck in the stilt

On which Copernicus

Touched the morning star…

Then the broom was ready

To leave the monastery.

The dust welcome it—

That great pornographer

Immediately wanted to

Look under its skirt

Charles Simic

Y EL ÓBOLO BAJO LA LENGUA

BROOMS

2

Brooms appear in dreambooks

As omens of approaching death.

This is their secret life.

In public, the act like flat-chested old maids

Preaching temperance.

They are sworn enemies of lyric poetry.

In prision they accompany the jailer,

Enter cells to hear confessions,

Their short-end comes down

When you last expect it.

Left alone behind a door

Of a condemned tenement,

They mutter to no one in particular,

Words like virgin wind moon-eclipse,

And that most sacred of all names:

Hyeronymous Bosch.

Charles Simic

Y EL ÓBOLO BAJO LA LENGUA

BROOMS

1

Only brooms

Know the devil

Still exists,

That the snow grows whiter

After a crow has flown over it,

That a dark dusty corner

Is the place of dreamers and children,

That a broom is also a tree

In the orchard of the poor,

That a hanging roach there

Is a mute dove.

Charles Simic

Y EL ÓBOLO BAJO LA LENGUA

                  FEAR

Fear passes from man to man

               Unknowing,

As one leaf passes its shudder

To another.

All at once the whole tree is trembling

and there is no sign of the wind.

Charles Simic

Y EL ÓBOLO BAJO LA LENGUA

    POEM

Every morning I forget how it is.

I watch the smoke mount

In great strides above the city.

I belong to no one.

Then, I remember my shoes,

How I have to put them on,

How bending over to tie them up

I will look into the earth.

                              Charles Simic