Poetry
by Billy Collins

Call it a field where the animals
who were forgotten by the Ark
come to graze under the evening clouds.

Or a cistern where the rain that fell
before history trickles over a concrete lip.

However you see it,
this is no place to set up
the three-legged easel of realism

or make the reader climb
over the many fences of a plot.

Let the portly novelist
with his noisy typewriter
describe the city where Francine was born,

how Albert read the paper on the train,
how curtains were blowing in the bedroom.

Let the playwright with her torn cardigan
and a dog curled on the rug
move the characters

from the wings to the stage
to face the many-eyed darkness of the house.

Poetry is no place for that.
We have enough to do
complaining about the price of tobacco,

passing the dripping ladle,
and singing songs to a bird in a cage.

We are busy doing nothing -
and all we need for that is an afternoon,
a rowboat under a blue sky,

and maybe a man fishing from a stone bridge,
or, better still, nobody on that bridge at all.

‘Think of it this way: the ideal poem for me is one in which the reader could never be sure at any given point if the poem were serious or trifling, earnest or playful. Poetry provides a safe home for ambiguity and ambivalence.

‘What keeps me writing poems ... is the impossible hope that one day I will produce the perfect poem, the one that is balanced precisely on the knife-edge between comedy and tragedy, or at least, between silliness and sincerity. As it is, every poem I have ever written loses its balance and falls to one or the other side.’

Billy Collins, 2003

‘... the poems often take as their starting points notations about the weather or landscape, as though clearing a space for meditative enlightenment ... an idle doodle ... develops into a startling depiction of time and mortality’

Maurice Riordan and Deryn Rees-Jones

‘Everything seemed more life-size than usual.’

Billy Collins, from ‘The Literary Life’ in ‘Nine Horses’.

Study in Orange and White
by Billy Collins
 
I knew that James Whistler was part of the Paris scene -
the café awning and the wicker chair -
but I was surprised when I discovered the painting
of his mother among all the colored dots
and jumpy brushstrokes
of the French Impressionists at the Musée d'Orsay.
 
And I was even more surprised
after a period of benevolent staring,
to notice how the stark profile of that woman,
fixed forever in her chair,
began to resemble my own ancient mother
now fixed forever in the earth, the stars, the air.
 
I figured Whistler titled the painting
Arrangement in Gray and Black
instead of what everyone else calls it,
to show he was part of the Paris scene,
but when I strolled along the riverbank,
after my museum tour,
I imagined how the woman’s heart
could have broken
by being demoted from mother
to a mere arrangement, a composition without color.
 
The summer couples leaned into each other
along the quay, and the wide boats
teeming with spectators slid up and down the Seine,
their watery reflections
lapping under the stone bridges
and I thought to myself:
how fatuous, how off-base of Whistler.
 
Like Botticelli calling The Birth of Venus
“Composition in Blue, Ocher, Green, and Pink,”
or the other way around
like Rothko labeling one of his sandwiches of color
“Fishing Boats Leaving Falmouth Harbor at Dawn.”
 
Or - as I scanned the menu at the café
where I had come to rest -
it would be like painting something droll,
say, a chef being roasted on a blazing spit
before an audience of ducks
and calling it “Study in Orange and White.”

By that time, though, a waiter had appeared
with Pernod and a pitcher of water,
and so I sat there thinking of nothing -
just watching the women and men
who were passing by,
mothers and sons walking their small fragile dogs -
and of course, about myself,
a kind of composition in blue and khaki,
and, once I had poured
some water into the glass of anise - milky-green.

Another reason why I don't keep a gun in the house
by Billy Collins

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Forgetfulness
by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.


Paris
by Billy Collins

In the apartment someone gave me,
the bathroom looked out on a little garden
at the bottom of an air shaft
with a few barely sprouting trees,
ivy clinging to the white cinder blocks,
a blue metal table and a rusted chair
where, it would seem, no-one had ever sat.

Every morning, a noisy bird
would flutter down between the buildings,
perch on a thin branch and yell at me
in French bird-talk
while I soaked in the tub
under the light from the pale translucent ceiling.

And while he carried on, I would lie there
in the warm soapy water
wondering what shirt I would put on that day,
what zinc-covered bar I would stand at
with my Herald Tribune and a cup of strong coffee.

After a lot of squawking, he would fly
back into the sky leaving only the sound
of a metal storefront being raised
or a scooter zipping by outside,
which was my signal
to stand up in the cloudy water
and reach for a towel,

time to start concentrating on which way
I would turn after I had locked the front door,
what shop signs I would see,
what bridges I would lean on
to watch the broad river undulating
like a long-playing record under the needle of my eye.

Time to stand dripping wet and wonder
about the hordes of people
I would pass in the street, mostly people
whose existence I did not believe in,
but a few whom I would glance at
and see my whole life
the way you see the ocean from the shore.

One morning after another,
I would fan myself dry with a towel
and wonder about what paintings
I would stand before that day,
looking forward to the usual -
the sumptuous reclining nudes,
the knife next to a wedge of cheese,
a landscape with pale blue mountains,
the heads and shoulders of gods
struggling with one another,
a foot crushing a snake -

but always hopeful for something new
like yesterday’s white turkeys in a field
or the single stalk of asparagus on a plate
in a small gilded frame,

always ready, now that I am dressed,
to cheer the boats of the beautiful,
the boats of the strange,
as they float down the river of this momentous day.




The Country
by Billy Collins

I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time -

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?