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Authors: Billy Collins

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BOOK: Nine Horses
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It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,

maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,

but you are not even close

to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show

that you are neither the boots in the corner

nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,

speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,

that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,

the evening paper blowing down an alley,

and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees

and the blind woman’s teacup.

But don’t worry, I am not the bread and the knife.

You are still the bread and the knife.

You will always be the bread and the knife,

not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

The Return of the Key

It was a drowsy summer afternoon,

hot wind stirring the papers in the room,

smoke slanting up from my cigarette

as from a tiny factory that produced only smoke.

I was reading William Carlos Williams,

growing weary of the note on the kitchen table

and the broken glass on the roadside,

so I reached into one of his small poems

and lifted out a tiny key

lying on a glass tray next to a glass tumbler

in a room of an inn where someone stood

in the doorway holding a suitcase.

I knew all things come in threes,

so I was not discouraged when the key

did not open the golden lock

on my daughter’s diary,

or the empty strongbox under the bed,

and I knew I was getting warm

when I entered the orangerie

and stood before the birdcage on its metal stand.

Small wonder that the bird

fluttered into the air

and circled the chandelier

as soon as the little door swung open.

Smaller wonder

that it banked sharply

against a background of windows,

then dove and disappeared

into the anthology of American poetry

that lay open on the table—

the key clenched in its beak,

the pages lifting like many wings in the breeze.

The Listener

I cannot see you a thousand miles from here,

but I can hear you

whenever you cough in your bedroom

or when you set down

your wineglass on a granite counter.

This afternoon

I even heard scissors moving

at the tips of your hair

and the dark snips falling

onto a marble floor.

I keep the jazz

on the radio turned off.

I walk across the floor softly,

eyes closed,

the windows in the house shut tight.

I hear a motor on the road in front,

a plane humming overhead,

someone hammering,

then there is nothing

but the white stone building of silence.

You must be asleep

for it to be this quiet,

so I will sit and wait

for the rustle of your blanket

or a noise from your dream.

Meanwhile, I will listen to the ant bearing

a dead comrade

across these floorboards—

the noble sounds

of his tread and his low keening.

The Literary Life

I woke up this morning,

as the blues singers like to boast,

and the first thing to enter my mind,

as the dog was licking my face, was Coventry Patmore.

Who
was
Coventry Patmore?

I wondered, as I rose

and set out on my journey to the encyclopedia

passing some children and a bottle cap on the way.

Everything seemed more life-size than usual.

Light in the shape of windows

hung on the walls next to the paintings

of birds and horses, flowers and fish.

Coventry Patmore,

I’m coming to get you, I hissed,

as I entered the library like a man stepping

into a freight elevator of science and wisdom.

How many things have I looked up

in a lifetime of looking things up?

I wondered, as I set the book on the piano

and began turning its large, weightless pages.

How would the world look

if all of its things were neatly arranged

in alphabetical order? I wondered,

as I found the
P
section and began zeroing in.

How long before I would forget Coventry Patmore’s

dates and the title of his long poem

on the sanctity of married love?

I asked myself as I closed the door to that room

and stood for a moment in the kitchen,

taking in the silvery toaster, the bowl of lemons,

and the white cat, looking as if

he had just finished his autobiography.

The Great Walter Pater

In the middle of the formal gardens,

laid out with fastidious symmetry

behind the gray stone château,

right at the center

where all the gravel paths lead the eye,

at the point where all the hedges

and the vivid flower beds converge,

is a small rectangular pond with a flagstone edge,

and in the center of that pond is a statue

of a naked boy holding a jar on one shoulder,

and from the mouth of that jar

a fine stream of water issues forth night and day.

I never for a minute wanted

to be a nightingale or a skylark

or a figure immobilized on the slope of an urn,

but when the dogs of trouble

have me running down a dark winding alley,

I would not mind being that boy—

or, if that is not possible,

I would choose, like the great Walter Pater,

to be one of the large, orange carp

that live under the surface of that pond,

swimming back and forth all summer long

in the watery glitter of sinking coins,

resting all winter, barely moving

under a smooth, translucent sheet of ice.

By a Swimming Pool Outside Siracusa

All afternoon I have been struggling

to communicate in Italian

with Roberto and Giuseppe who have begun

to resemble the two male characters

in my
Italian for Beginners
,

the ones always shopping, eating,

or inquiring about the times of trains.

Now I can feel my English slipping away,

like chlorinated water through my fingers.

I have made important pronouncements

in this remote limestone valley

with its trickle of a river.

I stated that it seems hotter

today even than it was yesterday

and that swimming is very good for you,

very beneficial, you might say.

I also posed burning questions

about the hours of the archaeological museum

and the location of the local necropolis.

But now I am alone in the evening light

which has softened the white cliffs,

and I have had a little gin in a glass with ice

which has softened my mood or—

how would you say in English—

has allowed my thoughts to traverse my brain

with greater gentleness, shall we say,

or, to put it less literally,

this drink has extended permission

to my mind to feel—what’s the word?—

a friendship with the vast sky

which is very—give me a minute—very blue

but with much great paleness

at this special time of day, or as we say in America, now.

Bermuda

When we walk down the bleached-out wooden stairs

to the beach and lie on our backs

on the blue and white chaises

near the edge of the water

on this dot in the atlas,

this single button on the blazer of the sea,

we come about as close

as a man and a woman can

to doing nothing.

All morning long we watch the clouds

roll overhead

or close our eyes and do the lazy

back-and-forth of talk,

our voices flattened by the drone of surf,

our words tumbling oddly in the wind.

It’s Good Friday here, hundreds of miles

from any mass of land,

thousands from Calvary.

Wild hibiscus twists along the roadsides,

the yellow-breasted bird sings its name,

and all the stores are closed

because today is the day to make hot cross buns

and fly kites from the beaches—

to eat the sweet cross,

to fix with a string a cross in the sky.

The white sand heats up

as one of us points out the snout of a pig

on the horizon, and higher up

a gaping alligator poised to eat a smaller cloud.

See how that one is a giant head,

like the devil wearing glasses

you say, but my eyes are shut against the sun

and I only hear your words,

softened and warped by the sea breeze,

telling me how the head is becoming a bicycle,

the high-wheel kind on playing cards,

while the sea rushes in, falls back—

marbles pouring endlessly onto a marble floor—

and the two of us so calm

it seems that this is not our only life,

just one in a series, charms on a bracelet,

as if every day we were not running

like the solitary runners on the beach

toward a darkness without shape

or waves, crosses or clouds,

as if one of us is not likely to get there first

leaving the other behind,

castaway on an island

with no pink houses or blue shutters,

no plum-colored ones trimmed in cream,

no offshore reef to burst the waves into foam,

and no familiar voice being bent in the wind.

Ignorance

It’s only a cold, cloud-hooded weekday

in the middle of winter,

but I am sitting up in my body

like a man riding an elephant

draped with a carpet of red and gold,

his turban askew,

singing a song about the return of the cranes.

And I am inside my own head

like a tiny homunculus,

a creature so excited over his naked existence

that he scurries all day

from one eye socket to the other

just to see what scenes are unfolding before me,

what streets, what pastures.

And to think that just hours ago

I was as sour as Samuel Johnson

with a few bad sherries in him,

quarreling in a corner of the Rat and Parrot,

full of scorn for the impertinence of men,

the inconstancy of women.

And to think further that I have no idea

what might have uplifted me,

unless it was when I first opened

the front door to look at the sky

so extensive and burdened with snow,

or was it this morning

when I walked along the reservoir?

Was it when the dog

scared up some ducks off the water

and I stopped to watch them flapping low

over the frozen surface,

and I counted them in flight,

all seven—the leader and the six hurrying behind.

Death in New Orleans, a Romance

Long into the night my pencil

hurried across the page,

a young messenger boy

running his nervous little errands,

making lines,

making comparisons—

the world is like this, the moon like that,

the mind, I wrote, is like a wire birdcage

hanging from a stand

with a wooden perch and a tiny mirror,

home of a single canary,

I went on,

always the same one, the same song every day,

then quiet under the floral hood of night.

Always the same yellow and white feathers,

I continued,

yellow for the past, white for the future—

I added for symbolic weight—

and on the day I die,

I wrote, curving toward the elegiac,

the wire door will swing open

and the bird take flight,

looping over the ironwork of the city,

the water tanks and windowed buildings,

then up into the clouds and stars,

I typed,

leaving my body behind,

slumped upon a café table,

my empty head in a pool of wine,

the waiter and two customers

bending over me with obvious concern.

Air Piano

Now that all the twilight has seeped

out of the room

and I am alone listening,

the bass is beginning to sound

like my father

ascending the flights of stairs,

always the same cadence

every weekday evening,

a beat you could build a city on.

And the alto is the woman

I sat next to on a train

who wore a tiny silver watch around her wrist.

The drums are drops of water

on my forehead,

one for every inhabitant of China.

And the tenor, perhaps,

is someone’s younger brother

who moved out west and never writes

or a swan passing under a willow.

But the piano—

the piano is the piano

BOOK: Nine Horses
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ads

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