Sailing Alone Around the Room

by Billy Collins

  and nods that I should play.

  So I put the mouthpiece to my lips

  and blow into it with all my living breath.

  We are all so foolish,

  my long bebop solo begins by saying,

  so damn foolish

  we have become beautiful without even knowing it.

  Some Final Words

  I cannot leave you without saying this:

  the past is nothing,

  a nonmemory, a phantom,

  a soundproof closet in which Johann Strauss

  is composing another waltz no one can hear.

  It is a fabrication, best forgotten,

  a wellspring of sorrow

  that waters a field of bitter vegetation.

  Leave it behind.

  Take your head out of your hands

  and arise from the couch of melancholy

  where the window-light falls against your face

  and the sun rides across the autumn sky,

  steely behind the bare trees,

  glorious as the high strains of violins.

  But forget Strauss.

  And forget his younger brother,

  the poor bastard who was killed in a fall

  from a podium while conducting a symphony.

  Forget the past,

  forget the stunned audience on its feet,

  the absurdity of their formal clothes

  in the face of sudden death,

  forget their collective gasp,

  the murmur and huddle over the body,

  the creaking of the lowered curtain.

  Forget Strauss

  with that encore look in his eye

  and his tiresome industry:

  more than five hundred finished compositions!

  He even wrote a polka for his mother.

  That alone is enough to make me flee the past,

  evacuate its temples,

  and walk alone under the stars

  down these dark paths strewn with acorns,

  feeling nothing but the crisp October air,

  the swing of my arms

  and the rhythm of my stepping—

  a man of the present who has forgotten

  every composer, every great battle,

  just me,

  a thin reed blowing in the night.

  FROM

  Picnic, Lightning

  (1998)

  Fishing on the Susquehanna in July

  I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna

  or on any river for that matter

  to be perfectly honest.

  Not in July or any month

  have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure—

  of fishing on the Susquehanna.

  I am more likely to be found

  in a quiet room like this one—

  a painting of a woman on the wall,

  a bowl of tangerines on the table—

  trying to manufacture the sensation

  of fishing on the Susquehanna.

  There is little doubt

  that others have been fishing

  on the Susquehanna,

  rowing upstream in a wooden boat,

  sliding the oars under the water

  then raising them to drip in the light.

  But the nearest I have ever come to

  fishing on the Susquehanna

  was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia

  when I balanced a little egg of time

  in front of a painting

  in which that river curled around a bend

  under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,

  dense trees along the banks,

  and a fellow with a red bandanna

  sitting in a small, green

  flat-bottom boat

  holding the thin whip of a pole.

  That is something I am unlikely

  ever to do, I remember

  saying to myself and the person next to me.

  Then I blinked and moved on

  to other American scenes

  of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,

  even one of a brown hare

  who seemed so wired with alertness

  I imagined him springing right out of the frame.

  To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country

  Hundreds of Years from Now

  I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some

  distant country hundreds of years from now.

  — Mary Oliver

  Nobody here likes a wet dog.

  No one wants anything to do with a dog

  that is wet from being out in the rain

  or retrieving a stick from a lake.

  Look how she wanders around the crowded pub tonight

  going from one person to another

  hoping for a pat on the head, a rub behind the ears,

  something that could be given with one hand

  without even wrinkling the conversation.

  But everyone pushes her away,

  some with a knee, others with the sole of a boot.

  Even the children, who don’t realize she is wet

  until they go to pet her,

  push her away

  then wipe their hands on their clothes.

  And whenever she heads toward me,

  I show her my palm, and she turns aside.

  O stranger of the future!

  O inconceivable being!

  whatever the shape of your house,

  however you scoot from place to place,

  no matter how strange and colorless the clothes you may wear,

  I bet nobody there likes a wet dog either.

  I bet everybody in your pub,

  even the children, pushes her away.

  I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of “Three Blind Mice”

  And I start wondering how they came to be blind.

  If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sisters,

  and I think of the poor mother

  brooding over her sightless young triplets.

  Or was it a common accident, all three caught

  in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?

  If not,

  if each came to his or her blindness separately,

  how did they ever manage to find one another?

  Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse

  to locate even one fellow mouse with vision

  let alone two other blind ones?

  And how, in their tiny darkness,

  could they possibly have run after a farmer’s wife

  or anyone else’s wife for that matter?

  Not to mention why.

  Just so she could cut off their tails

  with a carving knife, is the cynic’s answer,

  but the thought of them without eyes

  and now without tails to trail through the moist grass

  or slip around the corner of a baseboard

  has the cynic who always lounges within me

  up off his couch and at the window

  trying to hide the rising softness that he feels.

  By now I am on to dicing an onion

  which might account for the wet stinging

  in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard’s

  mournful trumpet on “Blue Moon,”

  which happens to be the next cut,

  cannot be said to be making matters any better.

  Afternoon with Irish Cows

  There were a few dozen who occupied the field

  across the road from where we lived,

  stepping all day from tuft to tuft,

  their big heads down in the soft grass,

  though I would sometimes pass a window

  and look out to see the field suddenly empty

  as if they had taken wing, flown off to another country.

  Then later, I would open the blue front door,

  and again the field would be full of their munching,

  or they wo
uld be lying down

  on the black-and-white maps of their sides,

  facing in all directions, waiting for rain.

  How mysterious, how patient and dumbfounded

  they appeared in the long quiet of the afternoons.

  But every once in a while, one of them

  would let out a sound so phenomenal

  that I would put down the paper

  or the knife I was cutting an apple with

  and walk across the road to the stone wall

  to see which one of them was being torched

  or pierced through the side with a long spear.

  Yes, it sounded like pain until I could see

  the noisy one, anchored there on all fours,

  her neck outstretched, her bellowing head

  laboring upward as she gave voice

  to the rising, full-bodied cry

  that began in the darkness of her belly

  and echoed up through her bowed ribs into her gaping mouth.

  Then I knew that she was only announcing

  the large, unadulterated cowness of herself,

  pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind

  to all the green fields and the gray clouds,

  to the limestone hills and the inlet of the blue bay,

  while she regarded my head and shoulders

  above the wall with one wild, shocking eye.

  Marginalia

  Sometimes the notes are ferocious,

  skirmishes against the author

  raging along the borders of every page

  in tiny black script.

  If I could just get my hands on you,

  Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,

  they seem to say,

  I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

  Other comments are more offhand, dismissive—

  “Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!”—

  that kind of thing.

  I remember once looking up from my reading,

  my thumb as a bookmark,

  trying to imagine what the person must look like

  who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”

  alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

  Students are more modest

  needing to leave only their splayed footprints

  along the shore of the page.

  One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.

  Another notes the presence of “Irony”

  fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

  Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,

  hands cupped around their mouths.

  “Absolutely,” they shout

  to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.

  “Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”

  Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points

  rain down along the sidelines.

  And if you have managed to graduate from college

  without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”

  in a margin, perhaps now

  is the time to take one step forward.

  We have all seized the white perimeter as our own

  and reached for a pen if only to show

  we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;

  we pressed a thought into the wayside,

  planted an impression along the verge.

  Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria

  jotted along the borders of the Gospels

  brief asides about the pains of copying,

  a bird singing near their window,

  or the sunlight that illuminated their page—

  anonymous men catching a ride into the future

  on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

  And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,

  they say, until you have read him

  enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

  Yet the one I think of most often,

  the one that dangles from me like a locket,

  was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye

  I borrowed from the local library

  one slow, hot summer.

  I was just beginning high school then,

  reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,

  and I cannot tell you

  how vastly my loneliness was deepened,

  how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,

  when I found on one page

  a few greasy looking smears

  and next to them, written in soft pencil—

  by a beautiful girl, I could tell,

  whom I would never meet—

  “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

  Some Days

  Some days I put the people in their places at the table,

  bend their legs at the knees,

  if they come with that feature,

  and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

  All afternoon they face one another,

  the man in the brown suit,

  the woman in the blue dress,

  perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

  But other days, I am the one

  who is lifted up by the ribs,

  then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse

  to sit with the others at the long table.

  Very funny,

  but how would you like it

  if you never knew from one day to the next

  if you were going to spend it

  striding around like a vivid god,

  your shoulders in the clouds,

  or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,

  staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

  Picnic, Lightning

  My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.

  —Lolita

  It is possible to be struck by a meteor

  or a single-engine plane

  while reading in a chair at home.

  Safes drop from rooftops

  and flatten the odd pedestrian

  mostly within the panels of the comics,

  but still, we know it is possible,

  as well as the flash of summer lightning,

  the thermos toppling over,

  spilling out on the grass.

  And we know the message

  can be delivered from within.

  The heart, no valentine,

  decides to quit after lunch,

  the power shut off like a switch,

  or a tiny dark ship is unmoored

  into the flow of the body’s rivers,

  the brain a monastery,

  defenseless on the shore.

  This is what I think about

  when I shovel compost

  into a wheelbarrow,

  and when I fill the long flower boxes,

  then press into rows

  the limp roots of red impatiens—

  the instant hand of Death

  always ready to burst forth

  from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak.

  Then the soil is full of marvels,

  bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco,

  red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick

  to burrow back under the loam.

  Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue,

  the clouds a brighter white,

  and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge

  against a round stone,

  the small plants singing

  with lifted faces, and the click

  of the sundial

  as one hour sweeps into the next.

  Morning

  Why do we bother with the rest of the day,

  the swale of the afternoon,

  the sudden dip into evening,

  then night with his notorious perfumes,

  his many-pointed stars?

  This is the best—

  throwing off the light cov
ers,

  feet on the cold floor,

  and buzzing around the house on espresso—

  maybe a splash of water on the face,

  a palmful of vitamins—

  but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,

  dictionary and atlas open on the rug,

  the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,

  a cello on the radio,

  and, if necessary, the windows—

  trees fifty, a hundred years old

  out there,

  heavy clouds on the way

  and the lawn steaming like a horse

  in the early morning.

  Bonsai

  All it takes is one to throw a room

  completely out of whack.

  Over by the window

  it looks hundreds of yards away,

  a lone stark gesture of wood

  on the distant cliff of a table.

  Up close, it draws you in,

  cuts everything down to its size.

  Look at it from the doorway,

  and the world dilates and bloats.

  The button lying next to it

  is now a pearl wheel,

  the book of matches is a raft,

  and the coffee cup a cistern

  to catch the same rain

  that moistens its small plot of dark, mossy earth.

  For it even carries its own weather,

  leaning away from a fierce wind

  that somehow blows

  through the calm tropics of this room.

  The way it bends inland at the elbow

  makes me want to inch my way

  to the very top of its spiky greenery,

  hold on for dear life

  and watch the sea storm rage,

  hoping for a tiny whale to appear.

  I want to see her plunging forward

  through the troughs,

  tunneling under the foam and spindrift

  on her annual, thousand-mile journey.

  Shoveling Snow with Buddha

  In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok

  you would never see him doing such a thing,

  tossing the dry snow over the mountain

  of his bare, round shoulder,

  his hair tied in a knot,

  a model of concentration.

  Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word

  for what he does, or does not do.

  Even the season is wrong for him.