Authors: Billy Collins
is twirling a peasant girl in a red frock
while a boy is playing a squeeze-box
near a turned-over barrel
upon which rest a knife, a jug, and a small drinking glass.
Two men in rough jackets
are playing cards at a wooden table.
And in the background a woman in a bonnet
stands behind the half-open Dutch door
talking to a merchant or a beggar who is leaning on a cane.
This is all I need to inject me with desire,
to fill me with the urge to lie down with you,
or someone very much like you,
on a cool marble floor or any fairly flat surface
as clouds go flying by
and the rustle of tall leafy trees
mixes with the notes of birdsong—
so clearly does the work speak of vanishing time,
obsolete musical instruments,
passing fancies, and the corpse
of the largely forgotten painter moldering
somewhere beneath the surface of present-day France.
The tip of the nose seemed the first to be lost,
then the arms and legs,
and later the stone penis if such a thing were featured.
And often an entire head followed the nose
as it might have done when bread
was baking in the side streets of ancient Rome.
No hope for the flute once attached
to the lips of that satyr with the puffed-out cheeks,
nor for the staff the shepherd boy once leaned on,
the sword no longer gripped by the warrior,
the poor lost ears of the sleeping boy,
and whatever it was Aphrodite once held in her severed hand.
But the torso is another story—
middle man, the last to go, bluntly surviving,
propped up on a pedestal with a length of pipe,
and the mighty stone ass endures,
so smooth and fundamental, no one
hesitates to leave the group and walk behind to stare.
And that is the way it goes here
in the diffused light from the translucent roof,
one missing extremity after another—
digits that got too close to the slicer of time,
hands snapped off by the clock,
whole limbs caught in the mortal thresher.
But outside on the city streets,
it is raining, and the pavement shines
with the crisscross traffic of living bodies—
hundreds of noses still intact,
arms swinging and hands grasping,
the skin still warm and foreheads glistening.
It’s anyone’s guess when the day will come
when there is nothing left of us
but the bare, solid plinth we once stood upon
now exposed to the open air,
just the wind in the trees and the shadows
of clouds sweeping over its hard marble surface.
It occurred to me around dusk
after I had lit three candles
and was pouring myself a glass of wine
that I had not uttered a word to a soul all day.
Alone in the house,
I was busy pushing the wheel in a mill of paper
or staring down a dark well of ink—
no callers at the door, no ring of the telephone.
But as the path lights came on,
I did recall having words with a turtle
on my morning walk, a sudden greeting
that sent him off his log splashing into the lake.
I had also spoken to the goldfish
as I tossed a handful of pellets into their pond,
and I had a short chat with the dog,
who cocked her head this way and that
as I explained that dinner was hours away
and that she should lie down by the door.
I also talked to myself as I was typing
and later on while I looked around for my boots.
So I had barely set foot on the path
that leads to the great villa of silence
where men and women pace while counting beads.
In fact, I had only a single afternoon
of total silence to show for myself,
a spring day in a cell in Big Sur,
twenty or so monks also silent in their nearby cells—
a community of Cameldolites,
an order so stringent, my guide told me,
that they make the Benedictines,
whom they had broken away from in the 11th century,
look like a bunch of Hells Angels.
Out of a lifetime of running my mouth
and leaning on the horn of the ego,
only a single afternoon of being truly quiet
on a high cliff with the Pacific spread out below,
but as I listened to the birdsong
by the window that day, I could feel my droplet
of silence swelling on the faucet
then dropping into the zinc basin of their serenity.
Yet since then—
nothing but the racket of self-advertisement,
the clamor of noisy restaurants,
the classroom proclamations,
the little king of the voice having its say,
and today the pride of writing this down,
which must be the reason my pen
has turned its back on me to hide its face in its hands.
We did not have the benefit of a guide,
no crone to lead us off the common path,
no ancient to point the way with a staff,
but there were badlands to cross,
rivers of fire and blackened peaks,
and eventually we could look down and see
the jeweler running around a gold ring,
the boss trapped in an hourglass,
the baker buried up to his eyes in flour,
the banker plummeting on a coin,
the teacher disappearing into a blackboard,
and the grocer silent under a pyramid of vegetables.
We saw the pilot nose-diving
and the whore impaled on a bedpost,
the pharmacist wandering in a stupor
and the child with toy wheels for legs.
You pointed to the soldier
who was dancing with his empty uniform
and I remarked on the blind tourist.
But what truly caught our attention
was the scene in the long mirror of ice:
you lighting the wick on your head,
me blowing on the final spark,
and our children trying to crawl away from their eggshells.
is not really the title of a movie
but if it was I would be sure to see it.
I love their short legs and big heads,
the whole hippo look.
Hundreds of them would frolic
in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,
and I would eat my popcorn
in the dark of a neighborhood theater.
When they opened their enormous mouths
lined with big stubby teeth
I would drink my enormous Coke.
I would be both in my seat
and in the water playing with the hippos,
which is the way it is
with a truly great movie.
Only a mean-spirited reviewer
would ask on holiday from what?
Maybe it was the fast-moving clouds
or the spring flowers quivering among the dead leaves,
but I knew this was one day I was born to seize—
not just another card in the deck of the year,
but March 19th itself,
looking as clear and fresh as the ten of diamonds.
Living life to the fullest is the only way,
I thought as I sat by a tall window
and tapped my pencil on the dome of a glass paperweight.
To drain the cup of life to the dregs
was a piece of irresistible advice,
I averred as I checked someone’s dates
in the
Dictionary of National Biography
and later, as I scribbled a few words
on the back of a picture postcard.
Crashing through the iron gates of life
is what it is all about,
I decided as I lay down on the carpet,
locked my hands behind my head,
and considered how unique this day was
and how different I was from the men
of hari-kari for whom it is disgraceful
to end up lying on your back.
Better, they think, to be found facedown
in blood-soaked shirt
than to be discovered with lifeless eyes
fixed on the elegant teak ceiling above you,
and now I can almost hear the silence
of the temple bells and the lighter silence
of the birds hiding in the darkness of a hedge.
There was no art in losing that coin
you gave me for luck, the one with the profile
of an emperor on one side and a palm on the other.
It rode for days in a pocket
of my black pants, the paint-speckled ones,
past storefronts, gas stations and playgrounds,
and then it was gone, as lost as the lost
theorems of Pythagoras, or the
Medea
by Ovid,
which also slipped through the bars of time,
and as ungraspable as the sin that landed him—
forever out of favor with Augustus—
on a cold rock on the coast of the Black Sea,
where eventually he died, but not before
writing a poem about the fish of those waters,
into which, as we know, he was never transformed,
nor into a flower, a tree, or a stream,
nor into a star like Julius Caesar,
not even into a small bird that could wing it back to Rome.
So much to be learned out here in the drizzle
with all the tall busses swinging themselves
so close to me around corners and men
in bunches smoking outside the betting parlors.
And when the rain falls steadily enough
to drive me into a gallery or a city castle,
then the knowledge only comes pouring down
whether I am in the mood for it or not.
Today, it’s the codex of Leonardo on display
in the dim light where you touch a screen
to turn a page, the margins busy with pulleys
and siphons, whirlwinds, tides, and sluices.
And better informed I am to read on a little card
the news that Herbert Hoover translated
into English for the first time the works
of Agricola, the father of modern mineralogy himself.
Out the windows of the gallery,
a jumble of raincoats and black umbrellas,
and so my afternoon education continues
with the discovery in a vitrine of Vegetarius,
who in the 4th century came up
with the idea of underwater warfare,
hand-to-hand combat beneath the lily pads
as if bloodying one another on the ground were not enough.
And if his illustration of an armed soldier
standing on the bottom of a lake
and breathing through a snake-like tube
comes at me tonight and shakes me out of sleep,
I will not coax an oval pill from its bottle
nor put on a robe and stand by the stove
looking at the ads in a magazine
while some milk is heating in a pan.
I only need to slide into place
the image of Leonardo at a table by a window,
his marvelling head resting in his hands,
as he wonders if water could exist on the moon.
Everyone has two birthdays
according to the English essayist Charles Lamb,
the day you were born and New Year’s Day—
a droll observation to mull over
as I wait for the tea water to boil in a kitchen
that is being transformed by the morning light
into one of those brilliant rooms of Matisse.
“No one ever regarded the First of January
with indifference,” writes Lamb,
for unlike Groundhog Day or the feast of the Annunciation,
this one marks nothing but the passage of time,
I realized, as I lowered a tin diving bell
of tea leaves into a little body of roiling water.
I admit to regarding my own birthday
as the joyous anniversary of my existence
probably because I was, and remain
to this day in late December, an only child.
And as an only child—
a tea-sipping, toast-nibbling only child
in a colorful room this morning—
I would welcome an extra birthday,
one more opportunity to stop what we are doing
for a moment and reflect on my being here on earth.
And one more might be a small consolation
to us all for having to face a death-day, too,
an X in a square
on some kitchen calendar of the future,
the day when each of us is thrown off the train of time
by a burly, heartless conductor
as it roars through the months and years,
party hats, candles, confetti, and horoscopes
billowing up in the turbulent storm of its wake.
It is 5:40 in Sawyer County, Wisconsin, a Tuesday
a few days before the birthday of Martin Luther, yes
it is 1959 and I need to do my chores
which include milking the ten cows—
did I mention it was 5:40 in the morning?—
and driving them with a stick into the pasture.
After breakfast (I am thinking oatmeal
with brown sugar and some raisins)
I will drive the twelve miles into town
and pick up a few things,