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 waking.

The street went on forever

And all along I could feel the pins

In my back, prickling

The dark and heavy cloth.

"The Little Pins of Memory" from

"The Book of Gods and Devils," copyright c.1990 by Charles Simic, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich