Shelley (by Charles Simic)

Shelley (by Charles Simic)

Original Text
Charles Simic, Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (London: Faber and Faber, 2004). This poem is reproduced on the Griffin Prize Web Site (from the winning volume on the 2005 International Shortlist).
1Poet of the dead leaves driven like ghosts,
2Driven like pestilence-stricken multitudes,
3I read you first
4One rainy evening in New York City,
5In my atrocious Slavic accent,
6Saying the mellifluous verses
7From a battered, much-stained volume
8I had bought earlier that day
9In a second-hand bookstore on Fourth Avenue
10Run by an initiate of the occult masters.
11The little money I had being almost spent,
12I walked the streets my nose in the book.
13I sat in a dingy coffee shop
14With last summer’s dead flies on the table.
15The owner was an ex-sailor
16Who had grown a huge hump on his back
17While watching the rain, the empty street.
18He was glad to have me sit and read.
19He’d refill my cup with a liquid dark as river Styx.
20Shelley spoke of a mad, blind, dying king;
21Of rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know;
22Of graves from which a glorious Phantom may
23Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.
24I too felt like a glorious phantom
25Going to have my dinner
26In a Chinese restaurant I knew so well.
27It had a three-fingered waiter
28Who’d bring my soup and rice each night
29Without ever saying a word.
30I never saw anyone else there.
31The kitchen was separated by a curtain
32Of glass beads which clicked faintly
33Whenever the front door opened.
34The front door opened that evening
35To admit a pale little girl with glasses.
36The poet spoke of the everlasting universe
37Of things … of gleams of a remoter world
38Which visit the soul in sleep …
39Of a desert peopled by storms alone …
40The streets were strewn with broken umbrellas
41Which looked like funereal kites
42This little Chinese girl might have made.
43The bars on MacDougal Street were emptying.
44There had been a fist fight.
45A man leaned against a lamp post arms extended as if
46   crucified,
47The rain washing the blood off his face.
48In a dimly lit side street,
49Where the sidewalk shone like a ballroom mirror
50At closing time--
51A well-dressed man without any shoes
52Asked me for money.
53His eyes shone, he looked triumphant
54Like a fencing master
55Who had just struck a mortal blow.
56How strange it all was … The world’s raffle
57That dark October night …
58The yellowed volume of poetry
59With its Splendors and Glooms
60Which I studied by the light of storefronts:
61Drugstores and barbershops,
62Afraid of my small windowless room
63Cold as a tomb of an infant emperor.
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2011