[New-Poetry] "To the One Reading Simic"

[Halvard Johnson]

To the One Reading Simic


Penitentiaries locked down for the night,
Thousands of felons lying awake in them,
As we, too, lie awake, mon amour,
Straining not to hear more than the quiet.
The furry whiteness at the ceiling
Of our darkened room like a patient
Etherized upon a table in the stone-cold morgue.

Do you hear the one reading Simic,
The faint sounds he makes—licking his finger,
Turning the pages? It could be your pulse or mine
In these wrists we lean our cabezas against
As if Norman Mailer had stopped by to peep
Through that one tiny crack in our door.



[source: "To the One Tunneling" by Charles Simic,
The New Yorker, Jan. 15, 2001]



Hal

Halvard Johnson
================
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
http://www.hamiltonstone.org
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20070802/8ac67ff2/attachment.html