Nine Horses

by Billy Collins

  its eyes open, like mine as I lie in bed tonight

  picturing this rare, lucky sparrow

  tucked into a holly bush now,

  a light snow tumbling through the windless dark.

  The Stare

  With a basin of warm water and a towel

  I am shaving my father

  late on a summer afternoon

  as he sits in a chair in striped pajamas.

  He screws up his face this way and that

  to make way for the razor,

  as someone passes with a tray,

  as someone else sobs in a corner.

  It is impossible to remember

  such closeness,

  impossible to know too

  whether the object of his vivid staring is

  the wavering treetops,

  his pale reflection in the window,

  or maybe just a splinter of light,

  a pinpoint caught within the glass itself.

  Surprise

  This—

  according to the voice on the radio,

  the host of a classical music program no less—

  this is the birthday of Vivaldi.

  He would be 325 years old today,

  quite bent over, I would imagine,

  and not able to see much through his watery eyes.

  Surely, he would be deaf by now,

  the clothes flaking off him,

  hair pitiably sparse.

  But we would throw a party for him anyway,

  a surprise party where everyone

  would hide behind the furniture to listen

  for the tap of his cane on the pavement

  and the sound of his dry, persistent cough.

  Poetry

  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 a 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.