Nine Horses

by Billy Collins

  As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse

  I pick an orange from a wicker basket

  and place it on the table

  to represent the sun.

  Then down at the other end

  a blue and white marble

  becomes the earth

  and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.

  I get a glass from a cabinet,

  open a bottle of wine,

  then I sit in a ladder-back chair,

  a benevolent god presiding

  over a miniature creation myth,

  and I begin to sing

  a homemade canticle of thanks

  for this perfect little arrangement,

  for not making the earth too hot or cold

  not making it spin too fast or slow

  so that the grove of orange trees

  and the owl become possible,

  not to mention the rolling wave,

  the play of clouds, geese in flight,

  and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.

  Then I fill my glass again

  and give thanks for the trout,

  the oak, and the yellow feather,

  singing the room full of shadows,

  as sun and earth and moon

  circle one another in their impeccable orbits

  and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.

  Trompe L’Oeil

  It was one thing to notice

  that behind the pepper mill on your kitchen counter

  there was an identical pepper mill

  painted on the white tiles,

  and that behind the saltshaker

  and the bottles of oil and vinegar

  exact images of themselves

  had also been applied there to fool the eye.

  But it was another thing—

  a higher note in the opera of Art and Life—

  to see that the bundle of asparagus

  you brought home for dinner,

  bound with a red rubber band,

  upright in a ceramic bowl of water,

  stood before its own painted version,

  a meticulous, Platonic rendition of itself.

  I kept you company in the kitchen,

  drank a little wine while you chopped and stirred,

  watched you loosen the bundle

  then trim and cook the stalks

  while the flat, timeless, inedible

  likeness of asparagus lingered on the wall.

  We had crostini that night,

  portobello mushrooms, grilled salmon,

  and, of course, buttery asparagus.

  And as I ate each spear,

  I kept one eye on the portrait of asparagus—

  the memory and ghost of the vegetable,

  a thing beyond our devouring.

  Even after I shut the door to the guest room

  and fell into the soft bed,

  I thought about the double serving of asparagus

  offered up by you,

  one for the eye and one for the tongue.

  As I lay in the heavy darkness,

  I felt like David Hume or William James

  contemplating the nature of asparagus,

  its troublesome epistemology—

  the appearance of its ferns and fibrous stalks,

  the reality of its succulent green tips.

  Creatures

  Hamlet noticed them in the shapes of clouds,

  but I saw them in the furniture of childhood,

  creatures trapped under surfaces of wood,

  one submerged in a polished sideboard,

  one frowning from a chair-back,

  another howling from my mother’s silent bureau,

  locked in the grain of maple, frozen in oak.

  I would see these presences, too,

  in a swirling pattern of wallpaper

  or in the various greens of a porcelain lamp,

  each looking so melancholy, so damned,

  some peering out at me as if they knew

  all the secrets of a secretive boy.

  Many times I would be daydreaming

  on the carpet and one would appear next to me,

  the oversize nose, the hollow look.

  So you will understand my reaction

  this morning at the beach

  when you opened your hand to show me

  a stone you had picked up from the shoreline.

  “Do you see the face?” you asked

  as the cold surf circled our bare ankles.

  “There’s the eye and the line of the mouth,

  like it’s grimacing, like it’s in pain.”

  “Well, maybe that’s because it has a fissure

  running down the length of its forehead

  not to mention a kind of twisted beak,” I said,

  taking the thing from you and flinging it out

  over the sparkle of blue waves

  so it could live out its freakish existence

  on the dark bottom of the sea

  and stop bothering innocent beachgoers like us,

  stop ruining everyone’s summer.

  Tipping Point

  At home, the jazz station plays all day,

  so sometimes it becomes indistinct,

  like the sound of rain,

  birds in the background, the surf of traffic.

  But today I heard a voice announce

  that Eric Dolphy, 36 when he died,

  has now been dead for 36 years.

  I wonder—

  did anyone sense something

  when another Eric Dolphy lifetime

  was added to the span of his life,

  when we all took another

  full Dolphy step forward in time,

  flipped over the Eric Dolphy yardstick once again?

  It would have been so subtle—

  like the sensation you might feel

  as you passed through the moment

  at the exact center of your life

  or as you crossed the equator at night in a boat.

  I never gave it another thought,

  but could that have been the little shift

  I sensed a while ago

  as I walked down in the rain to get the mail?

  Birthday

  Before it was over

  I took out a pencil and a notepad

  and figured out roughly what was left—

  a small box of Octobers, a handful of Aprils,

  little time to waste reading a large novel

  on the couch every evening,

  a few candles flaming in the corners of the room.

  A fishbowl of Mondays, a row of Fridays—

  yet I cannot come up with anything

  better than to strike a match,

  settle in under a light blanket,

  and open to the first sentence of Clarissa.

  Look at me setting off on this long journey

  through ink and tears,

  through secrecy and distress,

  anticipation and swordplay.

  As the darkness thickens

  and the morning glory puts down its trumpet,

  as worms begin to sing in the garden,

  and Christ looks down from the wall,

  I will begin inching toward the end—

  page one thousand five hundred and thirty-three

  in this paperback Penguin edition,

  introduction and notes by one Angus Ross.

  Albany

  As I sat on the sunny side of train #241

  looking out the window at the Hudson River,

  topped with a riot of ice,

  it appeared to the untrained eye

  that the train was whizzing north along the rails

  that link New York City and Niagara Falls.

  But as the winter light glared

  off the white river and the snowy fields,

  I knew that I was as motionless as a man on a couch

  and that the things I was ga
zing at—

  with affection, I should add—

  were really the ones that were doing the moving,

  running as fast as they could

  on their invisible legs

  in the opposite direction of the train.

  The rocky ledges and trees,

  blue oil drums and duck blinds,

  water towers and flashing puddles

  were dashing forever from my view,

  launching themselves from the twigs

  of the moment into the open sky of the past.

  How unfair of them, it struck me,

  as they persisted in their flight—

  evergreens and electrical towers,

  the swing set, a slanted fence,

  a tractor abandoned in a field—

  how unkind of them to flee from me,

  to forsake an admirer such as myself,

  a devotee of things—

  their biggest fan, you might say.

  Had I not taken a hound’s interest in this world,

  tipped my hat to the first magpie,

  shouted up to the passing geese?

  Had I not stopped enough times along the way

  to stare diligently

  into the eye of a roadside flower?

  Still, as I sat there between stations

  on the absolutely stationary train

  somewhere below Albany,

  I was unable to hide my wonderment

  at the uniformity of their purpose,

  at the kangaroo-like sprightliness of their exits.

  I pressed my face against the glass

  as if I were leaning on the window

  of a vast store devoted to the purveyance of speed.

  The club car would open in fifteen minutes,

  came the announcement

  just as a trestle bridge went flying by.

  Study in Orange and White

  I knew 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 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 thinking of nothing—

  just watching the women and men

  who were passing by,

  mothers and sons walking their 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.

  Rooms

  After three days of steady, inconsolable rain,

  I walk through the rooms of the house

  wondering which would be best to die in.

  The study is an obvious choice

  with its thick carpet and soothing paint,

  its overstuffed chair preferable

  to a doll-like tumble down the basement stairs.

  And the kitchen has a certain appeal—

  it seems he was boiling water for tea,

  the inspector will offer, holding up the melted kettle.

  Then there is the dining room,

  just the place to end up facedown

  at one end of its long table in a half-written letter

  or the bedroom with its mix of sex and sleep,

  upright against the headboard,

  a book having slipped to the floor—

  make it Mrs. Dalloway, which I have yet to read.

  Dead on the carpet, dead on the tiles,

  dead on the stone cold floor—

  it’s starting to sound like a ballad

  sung in a pub by a man with a coal red face.

  It’s all the fault of the freezing rain

  which is flicking against the windows,

  but when it finally lets up

  and gives way to broken clouds and a warm breeze,

  when the trees stand dripping in the light,

  I will quit these dark, angular rooms

  and drive along a country road

  into the larger rooms of the world,

  so vast and speckled, so full of ink and sorrow—

  a road that cuts through bare woods

  and tangles of red and yellow bittersweet

  these late November days.

  And maybe under the fallen wayside leaves

  there is hidden a nest of mice,

  each one no bigger than a thumb,

  a thumb with closed eyes,

  a thumb with whiskers and a tail,

  each one contemplating the sweetness of grass

  and the startling brevity of life.

  Nine Horses

  For my birthday,

  my wife gave me nine horse heads,

  ghostly photographs on squares of black marble,

  nine squares set in one large square,

  a thing so heavy that the artist himself

  volunteered to hang it

  from a wood beam against a white stone wall.

  Pale heads of horses in profile

  as if a flashcube had caught them walking in the night.

  Pale horse heads

  that overlook my reading chair,

  the eyes so hollow they must be weeping,

  the mouths so agape they could be dead—

  the photographer standing over them

  on a floor of straw, his black car parked by the stable door.

  Nine white horses,

  or one horse the camera has multiplied by nine.

  It hardly matters, such sadness is gathered here

  in their long white faces

  so far from the pasture and the cube of sugar—

  the face of St. Bartholomew, the face of St. Agnes.

  Odd team of horses,

  pulling nothing,

  look down on these daily proceedings.

  Look down upon this table and these glasses,

  the furled napkins,

  the evening wedding of the knife and fork.

  Look down like a nine-headed god

  and give us a sign of your displeasure

 
; or your gentle forbearance

  so that we may rejoice in the error of our ways.

  Look down on this ring

  of candles flickering under your pale heads.

  Let your suffering eyes

  and your anonymous deaths

  be the bridle that keeps us from straying from each other

  be the cinch that fastens us to the belly of each day

  as it gallops away, hooves sparking into the night.

  Litany

  You are the bread and the knife,

  The crystal goblet and the wine.

  Jacques Crickillon

  You are the bread and the knife,

  the crystal goblet and the wine.

  You are the dew on the morning grass,

  and the burning wheel of the sun.

  You are the white apron of the baker

  and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

  However, you are not the wind in the orchard,

  the plums on the counter,

  or the house of cards.