Charles Simic

[from The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems by Charles Simic]

The Little Pins of Memory

There was a child’s Sunday suit
Pinned to a tailor’s dummy
In a dusty store window.
The store looked closed for years.

I lost my way there once
In a Sunday kind of quiet,
Sunday kind of afternoon light
on a street of red-brick tenements.

How do you like that?
I said to no one.
How do you like that?
I said it again today upon walking.

That street went on forever
And all along I could feel the pins
In my back, prickling
The dark and heavy cloth.