Authors: Billy Collins
a tin of hoof softener for the horse,
some batteries, shells, a pair of rubber gloves,
and something for my wife but I don’t know what.
Maybe this cotton apron
with little pictures of the Eiffel Tower on it,
or she might like some hairpins, a box of tissues,
yet I am tempted by this anthology
of the Cavalier poets edited by Thomas Crofts
or maybe
The Pictorial History of Eton College
by B.J.W. Hill,
but after pacing up and down the aisles
of Olsen’s Emporium, I finally settle on
The Zen Teaching of Huang Po
translated from the Chinese (obviously)
by John Blofeld and published
recently by the infamous Grove Press,
and when I take everything up to Henry
at the big bronze cash register,
he asks have you seen today’s
Sentinel
and there’s her face, the dark eyes,
the long near-smile, and the flowing golden coat
and I’m leaning on the barn door back home
while my own collie, who looks a lot like her,
lies curled outside in a sunny patch
and all you can hear as the morning warms up
is the sound of the cows’ heavy breathing.
Never use the word
suddenly
just to create
tension.
—
Writing Fiction
Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias
outside in the garden,
and suddenly I was in the study
looking up the word
oligarchy
for the thirty-seventh time.
When suddenly, without warning,
you planted the last petunia in the flat,
and I suddenly closed the dictionary
now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.
A moment later, we found ourselves
standing suddenly in the kitchen
where you suddenly opened a can of cat food
and I just as suddenly watched you doing that.
I observed a window of leafy activity
and beyond that, a bird perched on the edge
of the stone birdbath
when suddenly you announced you were leaving
to pick up a few things at the market
and I stunned you by impulsively
pointing out that we were getting low on butter
and another case of wine would not be a bad idea.
Who could tell what the next moment would hold?
another drip from the faucet?
another little spasm of the second hand?
Would the painting of a bowl of pears continue
to hang on the wall from that nail?
Would the heavy anthologies remain on their shelves?
Would the stove hold its position?
Suddenly, it was anyone’s guess.
The sun rose ever higher in the sky.
The state capitals remained motionless on the wall map
when suddenly I found myself lying on a couch
where I closed my eyes and without any warning
began to picture the Andes, of all places,
and a path that led over the mountains to another country
with strange customs and eye-catching hats,
each one suddenly fringed with colorful little tassels.
All I do these drawn-out days
is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge
where there are no pheasants to be seen
and, last time I looked, no ridge.
I could drive over to Quail Falls
and spend the day there playing bridge,
but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail
would only remind me of Pheasant Ridge.
I know a widow at Fox Run
and another with a condo at Smokey Ledge.
One of them smokes, and neither can run,
so I’ll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.
Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge?
I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.
It was in between seasons,
after the thin twitter of late autumn
but before the icy authority of winter,
and I took in the scene from a porch,
a tableau of silo and weathervane
and a crowd of ferns on the edge of the woods—
nothing worth writing about really,
but it is too late to stop now
that the ferns and the silo have been mentioned.
I drank my warm coffee
and took note of the disused tractor
and the lopsided sign to the cheese factory.
Not one of those mornings
that makes you want to seize the day,
not even enough glory in it to make you want
to grasp every other day,
yet after staring for a while
at the plowed-under fields and the sky,
I turned back to the order of the kitchen
determined to seize firmly
the second Wednesday of every month that lay ahead.
Would anyone care to join me
in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
“What is the poet trying to say?”
as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts—
inarticulate wretches that they were,
biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.
Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
and the rest could only try and fail,
but we in Mrs. Parker’s third-period English class
here at Springfield High will succeed
with the help of these study questions
in saying what the poor poet could not,
and we will get all this done before
that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.
Tonight, however, I am the one trying
to say what it is this absence means,
the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.
The image of this vase of cut flowers,
not from our garden, is no help.
And the same goes for the single plate,
the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face
against these new windows—the drizzle and the morning frost.
So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker,
who is tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard,
and her students—a few with their hands up,
others slouching with their caps on backwards—
to figure out what it is I am trying to say
about this place where I find myself
and to do it before the noon bell rings
and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.
It is difficult to write an aubade,
a song about noon, or a few crepuscular lines
without stopping to realize
just where you are on the dial of a certain day,
which is at least a beginning
and better than the usual blind rush
into the future, believed to reside
over the next in an infinite series of hills.
I’m all for noticing that the light
in the tops of the trees
is different now with the grass moist
and cold, the heads of flowers yet unfolded,
all for occupying a chair by a window
or a wayside bench for an hour—
time enough to look here and there
as the caravan of time crosses the sand,
time to think of the dead and lost friends,
their faces hidden in the foliage,
and to consider the ruination of love,
a wisp of smoke rising from a chimney.
And who cares if it takes me all day
to write a poem about the dawn
and I finish in the dark with the night—
some love it best—draped across my shoulders.
I am an ant inside a blue bowl
on the table of a cruel prince.
Battle plans are being discussed.
Much rice wine is poured.
But even when he angers
and drives a long knife into the table,
I continue to circle the bowl,
hand-painted with oranges and green vines.
Whenever I stare into the future,
the low, blue hills of the future,
shading my eyes with one hand,
I no longer see a city of opals
with a sunny river running through it
or a dark city of coal and gutters.
Nor do I see children
donning their apocalyptic goggles
and hiding in doorways.
All I see is me attending your burial
or you attending mine,
depending on who gets to go first.
There is a light rain.
A figure under an umbrella
is reading from a thick book with a black cover.
And a passing cemetery worker
has cut the engine to his backhoe
and is taking a drink from a bottle of water.
It was getting late in the year,
the sky had been low and overcast for days,
and I was drinking tea in a glassy room
with a woman without children,
a gate through which no one had entered the world.
She was turning the pages of a large book
on a coffee table, even though we were drinking tea,
a book of colorful paintings—
a landscape, a portrait, a still life,
a field, a face, a pear and a knife, all turning on the table.
Men had entered the gate, but no boy or girl
had ever come out, I was thinking oddly
as she stopped at a page of clouds
aloft in a pale sky, tinged with red and gold.
This one is my favorite, she said,
even though it was only a detail, a corner
of a larger painting which she had never seen.
Nor did she want to see the countryside below
or the portrayal of some myth
in order for the billowing clouds to seem complete.
This was enough, this fraction of the whole,
just as the leafy scene in the windows was enough
now that the light was growing dim,
as was she enough, perfectly by herself
somewhere in the enormous mural of the world.
I remember late one night in Paris
speaking at length to a dog in English
about the future of American culture.
No wonder she kept cocking her head
as I went on about “summer movies”
and the intolerable poetry of my compatriots.
I was standing and she was sitting
on a dim street in front of a butcher shop,
and come to think of it, she could have been waiting
for the early morning return of the lambs
and the bleeding sides of beef
to their hooks in the window.
For my part, I had mixed my drinks,
trading in the tulip of wine
for the sharp nettles of whiskey.
Why else would I be wasting my time
and hers trying to explain “corn dog,”
“white walls,” and “the March of Dimes”?
She showed such patience for a dog
without breeding while I went on—
in a whisper now after shouts from a window—
about “helmet laws” and “tag sale”
wishing I only had my camera
so I could carry a picture of her home with me.
On the loopy way back to my hotel—
after some long and formal goodbyes—
I kept thinking how I would have loved
to hang her picture over the mantel
where my maternal grandmother
now looks down from her height as always,
silently complaining about the choice of the frame.
Then, before dinner each evening
I could stand before the image of that very dog,
a glass of wine in hand,
submitting all of my troubles and petitions
to the court of her dark-brown, adoring eyes.
What I forgot to tell you in that last poem
if you were paying attention at all
was that I really did love her at the time.
The maritime light in the final lines
might have seemed contrived,
as false as any puffed up Italian sonnet,
and the same could be said
for the high cliffside flowers
I claimed to have introduced to her hair
and sure, the many imaginary moons
I said were circling our bed as we slept,
the cosmos enclosed by the walls of the room.
But the truth is we loved
to take long walks on the windy shore,
not the shore between the sea of her
and the symbolic land of me,
but the real shore of empty shells,
the sun rising, the water running up and back.
So much younger and with a tall, young son
in the house above ours on a hill,
it seemed that death had blundered once again.
Was it poor directions, the blurring rain,
or the too-small numerals on the mailbox
that sent his dark car up the wrong winding driveway?
Surely, it was me he was looking for—
overripe, childless, gaudy with appetite,
the one who should be ghosting over the rooftops
not standing barefooted in this kitchen
on a sun-shot October morning
after eight days and nights of downpour,