Sailing Alone Around the Room

by Billy Collins

  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.

  Candle Hat

  In most self-portraits it is the face that dominates:

  Cézanne is a pair of eyes swimming in brushstrokes,

  Van Gogh stares out of a halo of swirling darkness,

  Rembrandt looks relieved, as if he were taking a breather

  from painting The Blinding of Samson.

  But in this one Goya stands well back from the mirror

  and is seen posed in the clutter of his studio

  addressing a canvas tilted back on a tall easel.

  He appears to be smiling out at us as if he knew

  we would be amused by the extraordinary hat on his head

  which is fitted around the brim with candle holders,

  a device that allowed him to work into the night.

  You can only wonder what it would be like

  to be wearing such a chandelier on your head

  as if you were a walking dining room or concert hall.

  But once you see this hat there is no need to read

  any biography of Goya or to memorize his dates.

  To understand Goya you only have to imagine him

  lighting the candles one by one, then placing

  the hat on his head, ready for a night of work.

  Imagine him surprising his wife with his new invention,

  then laughing like a birthday cake when she saw the glow.

  Imagine him flickering through the rooms of his house

  with all the shadows flying across the walls.

  Imagine a lost traveler knocking on his door

  one dark night in the hill country of Spain.

  “Come in,” he would say, “I was just painting myself,”

  as he stood in the doorway holding up the wand of a brush,

  illuminated in the blaze of his famous candle hat.

  Student of Clouds

  The emotion is to be found in the clouds,

  not in the green solids of the sloping hills

  or even in the gray signatures of rivers,

  according to Constable, who was a student of clouds

  and filled shelves of sketchbooks with their motion,

  their lofty gesturing and sudden implication of weather.

  Outdoors, he must have looked up thousands of times,

  his pencil trying to keep pace with their high voyaging

  and the silent commotion of their eddying and flow.

  Clouds would move beyond the outlines he would draw

  as they moved within themselves, tumbling into their centers

  and swirling off at the burning edges in vapors

  to dissipate into the universal blue of the sky.

  In photographs we can stop all this movement now

  long enough to tag them with their Latin names.

  Cirrus, nimbus, stratocumulus—

  dizzying, romantic, authoritarian—

  they bear their titles over the schoolhouses below

  where their shapes and meanings are memorized.

  High on the soft blue canvases of Constable

  they are stuck in pigment, but his clouds appear

  to be moving still in the wind of his brush,

  inching out of England and the nineteenth century

  and sailing over these meadows where I am walking,

  bareheaded beneath this cupola of motion,

  my thoughts arranged like paint on a high blue ceiling.

  The Dead

  The dead are always looking down on us, they say,

  while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,

  they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven

  as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

  They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,

  and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,

  drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,

  they think we are looking back at them,

  which makes them lift their oars and fall silent

  and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

  The Man in the Moon

  He used to frighten me in the nights of childhood,

  the wide adult face, enormous, stern, aloft.

  I could not imagine such loneliness, such coldness.

  But tonight as I drive home over these hilly roads

  I see him sinking behind stands of winter trees

  and rising again to show his familiar face.

  And when he comes into full view over open fields

  he looks like a young man who has fallen in love

  with the dark earth,

  a pale bachelor, well-groomed and full of melancholy,

  his round mouth open

  as if he had just broken into song.

  The Wires of the Night

  I thought about his death for so many hours,

  tangled there in the wires of the night,

  that it came to have a body and dimensions,

  more than a voice shaking over the telephone

  or the black obituary boldface of name and dates.

  His death now had an entrance and an exit, doors and stairs,

  windows and shutters which are the motionless wings

  of windows. His death had a head and clothes,

  the white shirt and baggy trousers of death.

  His death had pages, a dark leather cover, an index,

  and the print was too minuscule for anyone to read.

  His death had hinges and bolts that were oiled and locked,

  had a loud motor, four tires, an antenna that listened

  to the wind, and a mirror in which you could see the past.

  His death had sockets and keys, it had walls and beams.

  It had a handle which you could not hold and a floor

  you could not lie down on in the middle of the night.

  In the freakish pink and gray of dawn I took

  his death to bed with me and his death was my bed

  and in every corner of the room it hid from the light,

  and then it was the light of day and the next day

  and all the days to follow, and it moved into the future

  like the sharp tip of a pen moving across an empty page.

  Vade Mecum

  I want the scissors to be sharp

  and the table to be perfectly level

  when you cut me out of my life

  and paste me in that book you always carry.

  Not Touching

  The valentine of desire is pasted over my heart

  and still we are not touching, like things

  in a poorly done still life

  where the knife appears to be floating over the plate

  which is itself hovering above the table somehow,

  the entire arrangement of apple, pear, and wineglass

  having forgotten the law of gravity,

  refusing to be still,

  as if the painter had caught them all

  in a rare moment of slow flight

  just before they drifted out of the room

  through a window of perfectly realistic sunlight.

  The History Teacher

  Trying to protect his students’ innocence

  he told them the Ice Age was really just

  the Chilly Age, a period of a million years

  when everyone had to wear sweaters.

  And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,

  named after the long driveways of the time.

  The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more

  than an outbreak of questions such as
>
  “How far is it from here to Madrid?”

  “What do you call the matador’s hat?”

  The War of the Roses took place in a garden,

  and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom

  on Japan.

  The children would leave his classroom

  for the playground to torment the weak

  and the smart,

  mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

  while he gathered up his notes and walked home

  past flower beds and white picket fences,

  wondering if they would believe that soldiers

  in the Boer War told long, rambling stories

  designed to make the enemy nod off.

  First Reader

  I can see them standing politely on the wide pages

  that I was still learning to turn,

  Jane in a blue jumper, Dick with his crayon-brown hair,

  playing with a ball or exploring the cosmos

  of the backyard, unaware they are the first characters,

  the boy and girl who begin fiction.

  Beyond the simple illustration of their neighborhood

  the other protagonists were waiting in a huddle:

  frightening Heathcliff, frightened Pip, Nick Adams

  carrying a fishing rod, Emma Bovary riding into Rouen.

  But I would read about the perfect boy and his sister

  even before I would read about Adam and Eve, garden and gate,

  and before I heard the name Gutenberg, the type

  of their simple talk was moving into my focusing eyes.

  It was always Saturday and he and she

  were always pointing at something and shouting “Look!”

  pointing at the dog, the bicycle, or at their father

  as he pushed a hand mower over the lawn,

  waving at aproned Mother framed in the kitchen doorway,

  pointing toward the sky, pointing at each other.

  They wanted us to look but we had looked already

  and seen the shaded lawn, the wagon, the postman.

  We had seen the dog, walked, watered, and fed the animal,

  and now it was time to discover the infinite, clicking

  permutations of the alphabet’s small and capital letters.

  Alphabetical ourselves in the rows of classroom desks,

  we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read.

  Purity

  My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,

  weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.

  This is how I go about it:

  I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.

  Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile

  as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only

  a white shirt, a pair of pants, and a pot of cold tea.

  Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.

  I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.

  I do this so that what I write will be pure,

  completely rinsed of the carnal,

  uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.

  Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them

  on a small table near the window.

  I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms

  when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.

  Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.

  I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.

  I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.

  I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.

  Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.

  In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,

  most of them exploiting the connection between sex and death.

  I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe

  where there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.

  After a spell of this I remove my penis too.

  Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.

  Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.

  Now I write only about death, most classical of themes

  in language light as the air between my ribs.

  Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.

  I replace my organs and slip back into my flesh

  and clothes. Then I back the car out of the garage

  and speed through woods on winding country roads,

  passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds,

  all perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet.

  Nostalgia

  Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.

  You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,

  and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,

  the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.

  Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,

  and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”

  Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

  Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet

  marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags

  of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.

  Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle

  while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.

  We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.

  These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.

  The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big.

  People would take walks to the very tops of hills

  and write down what they saw in their journals without

  speaking.

  Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.

  We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.

  It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

  I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.

  Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.

  And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,

  time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,

  or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me

  recapture the serenity of last month when we picked

  berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

  Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.

  I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees

  and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light

  flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse

  and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

  As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,

  letting my memory rush over them like water

  rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.

  I was even thinking a little about the future, that place

  where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,

  a dance whose name we can only guess.

  FROM

  The Art of Drowning

  (1995)

  Consolation

  How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,

  wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hill towns.

  How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,

  fully grasping the meaning of every road sign and billboard

  and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

  There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous

  domes and there is no need to memorize a succession

  of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.

  No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon’s

  little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.

  How much better to command the simple precin
ct of home

  than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.

  Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?

  Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyed camera

  eager to eat the world one monument at a time?

  Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice,

  I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress

  known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning

  paper, all language barriers down,

  rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.

  And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone

  willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.

  I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal

  what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.

  It is enough to climb back into the car

  as if it were the great car of English itself

  and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off

  down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.

  Osso Buco

  I love the sound of the bone against the plate

  and the fortress-like look of it

  lying before me in a moat of risotto,

  the meat soft as the leg of an angel

  who has lived a purely airborne existence.

  And best of all, the secret marrow,

  the invaded privacy of the animal

  prized out with a knife and swallowed down

  with cold, exhilarating wine.

  I am swaying now in the hour after dinner,

  a citizen tilted back on his chair,

  a creature with a full stomach—

  something you don’t hear much about in poetry,

  that sanctuary of hunger and deprivation.

  You know: the driving rain, the boots by the door,

  small birds searching for berries in winter.

  But tonight, the lion of contentment

  has placed a warm, heavy paw on my chest,

  and I can only close my eyes and listen

  to the drums of woe throbbing in the distance