Authors: Billy Collins
me with my presumptuous breathing,
my arrogant need for coffee,
my love of the colorful leaves beyond the windows.
The weight of my clothes, not his,
might be hanging in the darkness of a closet today,
my rake idle, my pen across a notebook.
The harmony of this house, not his,
might be missing a voice,
the hallways jumpy with the cry of the telephone—
if only death had consulted his cracked leather map,
then bent to wipe the fog
from the windshield with an empty sleeve.
With only a two-and-a-half-inch wooden goose
to keep me company at this desk,
I am beginning a new life of discipline.
No more wandering out in thunderstorms
hoping to be hit by a bolt of lightning
from the raised hand of Randall Jarrell.
No more standing at an open window
with my lyre strings finely tuned
waiting for a stray zephyr to blow my way.
Instead I will report here every morning
and bend over my work like St. Jerome
with his cowl, quill, and a skull for a paperweight.
And the small white goose with his yellow
feet and beak and a black dot for an eye
is more than enough companionship for me.
He is well worth the dollar I paid for him
in a roadside trinket shop in New Mexico
and more familiar to me than the household deities
of this guest cottage in the woods—
two porcelain sphinxes on the mantel
and a pale, blank-eyed Roman bust on a high shelf
on this first morning without you—
me holding a coffee I forgot to pay for
and the gods of wind and sun contending in the crowded trees.
When it’s late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter
of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.
It’s more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.
A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.
Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.
No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.
You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,
but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.
The ancient Greeks … used to chain their
statues to prevent them from fleeing.
—Michael Kimmelman
It might have been the darkening sky
that sent them running in all directions
that afternoon as the air turned a pale yellow,
but were they not used to standing out
in the squares of our city
in every kind of imaginable weather?
Maybe they were frightened by a headline
on a newspaper that was blowing by
or was it the children in their martial arts uniforms?
Did they finally learn about the humans
they stood for as they pointed a sword at a cloud?
Did they know something we did not?
Whatever the cause, no one will forget
the sight of all the white marble figures
leaping from their pedestals and rushing away.
In the parks, the guitarists fell silent.
The vendor froze under his umbrella.
A dog tried to hide in his owner’s shadow.
Even the chess players under the trees
looked up from their boards
long enough to see the bronze generals
dismount and run off, leaving their horses
to peer down at the circling pigeons
who were stealing a few more crumbs from the poor.
Tonight I turned off every light
in this stone, slate-roofed cottage,
then I walked out into the blackened woods
and sat on a rock next to a bust
of what looked like a sneering Roman consul,
a mantle of concrete draped over his shoulders.
I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon
and the stars scattered like a handful of salt
across the faraway sky,
and I visited some of my new quandaries
including where to live and what to do there,
and leaning back to take in the sizable night,
I arrived at the decision
that I would never make another decision.
Instead of darting this way or that,
I would stand at a crossroads until my watch
ran down and the clothes fell off me
and were carried by a heavy rain out to sea.
Instead of choosing one thing over another,
I would do nothing but picture
a little silver ball swinging back and forth from a cloud.
I would celebrate only the two equinoxes
and pass the rest of the time
balancing a silver scale with silver coins.
And I would see to it that the image of a seesaw—
or teeter-totter as it once was called—
was added to my family crest,
stitched into that empty patch
just below the broken plow
and above the blindfolded bee.
The legendary Cang Jie was said to
have invented writing after observing
the tracks of birds.
A light snow last night,
and now the earth falls open to a fresh page.
A high wind is breaking up the clouds.
Children wait for the yellow bus in a huddle,
and under the feeder, some birds
are busy writing short stories,
poems, and letters to their mothers.
A crow is working on an editorial.
That chickadee is etching a list,
and a robin walks back and forth
composing the opening to her autobiography.
All so prolific this morning,
these expressive little creatures,
and each with an alphabet of only two letters.
A far cry from me watching
in silence behind a window wondering
what just frightened them into flight—
a dog’s bark, a hawk overhead?
or had they simply finished
saying whatever it was they had to say?
According to the guest information directory,
baby listening is a service offered by this seaside hotel.
Baby listening—not a baby who happens to be listening,
as I thought when I first checked in.
Leave the receiver off the hook
,
the directory advises,
and your infant can be monitored by the staff
,
though the staff
, the entry continues,
cannot be held responsible for the well-being
of the baby in question
.
Fair enough, someone to listen to the baby.
But the phrase did suggest a baby who is listening,
lying there in the room next to mine
listening to my pen scratching against the page,
or a more advanced baby who has crawled
down the hallway of the hotel
and is pressing its tiny, curious ear against my door.
Lucky for some of us,
poetry is a place where both are true at once,
where meaning only one thing at a time spells malfunction.
Poetry wants to have the baby who is listening at my door
as well as the baby who is being listened to,
quietly breathing by the nearby telephone.
And it also wants the baby
who is making sounds of distress
into the curved receiver lying in the crib
while the girl at reception has just stepped out
to have a smoke with her boyfriend
in the dark by the great sway and wash of the North Sea.
Poetry wants that baby, too,
even a little more than it wants the others.
is not just a phrase I made up
though it would have given me pleasure
to have written those words in a notebook
then looked up at the sky wondering what they meant.
No, I saw Bathtub Families in a pharmacy
on the label of a clear plastic package
containing one cow and four calves,
a little family of animals meant to float in your tub.
I hesitated to buy it because I knew
I would then want the entire series of Bathtub Families,
which would leave no room in the tub
for the turtles, the pigs, the seals, the giraffes, and me.
It’s enough just to have the words,
which alone make me even more grateful
that I was born in America
and English is my mother tongue.
I was lucky, too, that I waited
for the pharmacist to fill my prescription,
otherwise I might not have wandered
down the aisle with the Bathtub Families.
I think what I am really saying is that language
is better than reality, so it doesn’t have
to be bath time for you to enjoy
all the Bathtub Families as they float in the air around your head.
So much gloom and doubt in our poetry—
flowers wilting on the table,
the self regarding itself in a watery mirror.
Dead leaves cover the ground,
the wind moans in the chimney,
and the tendrils of the yew tree inch toward the coffin.
I wonder what the ancient Chinese poets
would make of all this,
these shadows and empty cupboards?
Today, with the sun blazing in the trees,
my thoughts turn to the great
tenth-century celebrator of experience,
Wa-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things
could hardly be restrained,
and to his joyous counterpart in the western provinces, Ye-Hah.
When I happened to notice myself
walking naked past a wall-length mirror
one spring morning
in a house by the water
where a friend was letting me stay,
I looked like one of those silhouettes
that illustrate the evolution of man,
but not exactly the most recent figure.
I seemed to represent a more primitive stage,
maybe not the round-shouldered ape
dragging his knuckles on the ground,
but neither the fully upright hominoid
ready to put on a suit and head for the office.
Was it something in the slope of my brow
or my slack belly?
Was this the beginning of the Great Regression
as the anthropologists of tomorrow would call it?
I was never the smartest monkey on the block,
I thought to myself in the shower,
but I was at least advanced enough to be standing
under a cascade of steaming water,
and I did have enough curiosity to wonder
what the next outline in the sequence might look like:
the man of the future stepping forward
like the others rising to their hind legs behind him,
only with a longer stride, a more ample cranium,
and maybe a set of talons,
or a pair of useless, cherubic wings.
As soon as the elderly waiter
placed before me the fish I had ordered,
it began to stare up at me
with its one flat, iridescent eye.
I feel sorry for you, it seemed to say,
eating alone in this awful restaurant
bathed in such unkindly light
and surrounded by these dreadful murals of Sicily.
And I feel sorry for you, too—
yanked from the sea and now lying dead
next to some boiled potatoes in Pittsburgh—
I said back to the fish as I raised my fork.
And thus my dinner in an unfamiliar city
with its rivers and lighted bridges
was graced not only with chilled wine
and lemon slices but with compassion and sorrow
even after the waiter had removed my plate
with the head of the fish still staring
and the barrel vault of its delicate bones
terribly exposed, save for a shroud of parsley.
As young as I look,
I am growing older faster than he,
seven to one
is the ratio they tend to say.
Whatever the number,
I will pass him one day
and take the lead
the way I do on our walks in the woods.
And if this ever manages
to cross his mind,
it would be the sweetest
shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass.