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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Simic
Charles Simic
Charles Simic was born on May 9, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. In 1953 he emigrated to the United States. Since 1967 he has published more than sixty books in the U.S. and abroad, including Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize...
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This Morning  
by Charles Simic

Enter without knocking, hard-working ant.

I'm just sitting here mulling over
What to do this dark, overcast day?
It was a night of the radio turned down low,
Fitful sleep, vague, troubling dreams.
I woke up lovesick and confused.
I thought I heard Estella in the garden singing
And some bird answering her,
But it was the rain. Dark tree tops swaying
And whispering. "Come to me my desire,"
I said. And she came to me by and by,
Her breath smelling of mint, her tongue
Wetting my cheek, and then she vanished.
Slowly day came, a gray streak of daylight
To bathe my hands and face in.
Hours passed, and then you crawled
Under the door, and stopped before me.
You visit the same tailors the mourners do,
Mr. Ant. I like the silence between us,
The quiet--that holy state even the rain
Knows about. Listen to her begin to fall,
As if with eyes closed,
Muting each drop in her wild-beating heart.



From A Wedding in Hell, published by Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Charles Simic. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the author.
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