“A wind so mild this afternoon it touches our faces as we lie in the shade like little children…

“A wind so mild this afternoon it touches our faces as we lie in the shade like little children going to sleep”

At the New York Review of Books, the bewilderingly original Pulitzer-winning poet Charles Simic puts up a remarkable prose poem and the best summertime read of 2013:

What kind of birdie are you? Whistling outside my window as if a pretty girl was passing by?

A wind so mild this afternoon it touches our faces as we lie in the shade like little children going to sleep.

Summer, here, is a quixotic, voluptuous lulling, whose escapist dreaminess begins to fade with age. “To my great regret, I no longer know how to be lazy, and summer is no fun without sloth,” Simic writes, and then remembers his childhood:

As soon as the weather got hot, I looked for a shady place to lie down. When I got bored with daydreaming, I took a nap. One time I dozed off on the Oak Street Beach in Chicago and didn’t wake till it was almost evening, surprised to see the empty beach, the tall buildings along the lake already in shadow, and feel my back hurting from the sun and my head not knowing for a moment how I got there. After getting up and stretching, yawning, and scratching for a while, I sat down once again and thought to myself, How wonderful all this is.

Two dogs, one jumping from the dock into the lake to retrieve the sticks his owner keeps throwing, and the other one looking on in disgust.

“A spiritual nymphomaniac,” I overheard someone say on the beach while I lay in the sun covered with newspapers. A woman, I assume, ready to jump into bed with a saint.

Emerson’s journals, 1844–1845: “As we read the newspapers, and we see the effrontery with which money & power carry their ends, and ride over honesty &good-meaning, morals & religion seem to become mere shrieking & impotence.” It could have been written today.

As always, Simic moves fluently between dissociated images with a warm, easy authority, turning the ordinary eclectic and then doing the reverse. “I remember a fellow standing on a sea cliff one summer, swaying and waving his arms as if defending the sunset before some high court hidden among the evening clouds against the charge of imitating bad art.” The end of the piece:

In the country, night lets itself into our homes and makes itself quickly comfortable, acting like it owns the place.

I read somewhere that Napoleon, who feared neither the sword nor the bullet, was afraid of a dark room.

“An old fashioned gentleman,” people used to say about my father. Like me, I imagine, he waited for the leaves outside his window to fall asleep first before he himself did.

Tonight, it looks like they are celebrating someone’s golden wedding anniversary in one of the constellations in the sky. I can tell because the ladies up there are wearing a lot of expensive jewelry.

Photo via Clapagare/flickr.