Sailing Alone Around the Room

by Billy Collins

  In all his manifestations, is it not warm and slightly humid?

  Is this not implied by his serene expression,

  that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?

  But here we are, working our way down the driveway,

  one shovelful at a time.

  We toss the light powder into the clear air.

  We feel the cold mist on our faces.

  And with every heave we disappear

  and become lost to each other

  in these sudden clouds of our own making,

  these fountain-bursts of snow.

  This is so much better than a sermon in church,

  I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.

  This is the true religion, the religion of snow,

  and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,

  I say, but he is too busy to hear me.

  He has thrown himself into shoveling snow

  as if it were the purpose of existence,

  as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway

  you could back the car down easily

  and drive off into the vanities of the world

  with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.

  All morning long we work side by side,

  me with my commentary

  and he inside the generous pocket of his silence,

  until the hour is nearly noon

  and the snow is piled high all around us;

  then, I hear him speak.

  After this, he asks,

  can we go inside and play cards?

  Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk

  and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table

  while you shuffle the deck,

  and our boots stand dripping by the door.

  Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes

  and leaning for a moment on his shovel

  before he drives the thin blade again

  deep into the glittering white snow.

  Snow

  I cannot help noticing how this slow Monk solo

  seems to go somehow

  with the snow

  that is coming down this morning,

  how the notes and the spaces accompany

  its easy falling

  on the geometry of the ground,

  on the flagstone path,

  the slanted roof,

  and the angles of the split-rail fence

  as if he had imagined a winter scene

  as he sat at the piano

  late one night at the Five Spot

  playing “Ruby, My Dear.”

  Then again, it’s the kind of song

  that would go easily with rain

  or a tumult of leaves,

  and for that matter it’s a snow

  that could attend

  an adagio for strings,

  the best of the Ronettes,

  or George Thorogood and the Destroyers.

  It falls so indifferently

  into the spacious white parlor of the world,

  if I were sitting here reading

  in silence,

  reading the morning paper

  or reading Being and Nothingness,

  not even letting the spoon

  touch the inside of the cup,

  I have a feeling

  the snow would even go perfectly with that.

  Japan

  Today I pass the time reading

  a favorite haiku,

  saying the few words over and over.

  It feels like eating

  the same small, perfect grape

  again and again.

  I walk through the house reciting it

  and leave its letters falling

  through the air of every room.

  I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.

  I say it in front of a painting of the sea.

  I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.

  I listen to myself saying it,

  then I say it without listening,

  then I hear it without saying it.

  And when the dog looks up at me,

  I kneel down on the floor

  and whisper it into each of his long white ears.

  It’s the one about the one-ton

  temple bell

  with the moth sleeping on its surface,

  and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating

  pressure of the moth

  on the surface of the iron bell.

  When I say it at the window,

  the bell is the world

  and I am the moth resting there.

  When I say it into the mirror,

  I am the heavy bell

  and the moth is life with its papery wings.

  And later, when I say it to you in the dark,

  you are the bell,

  and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,

  and the moth has flown

  from its line

  and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.

  Victoria’s Secret

  The one in the upper left-hand corner

  is giving me a look

  that says I know you are here

  and I have nothing better to do

  for the remainder of human time

  than return your persistent but engaging stare.

  She is wearing a deeply scalloped

  flame-stitch halter top

  with padded push-up styling

  and easy side-zip tap pants.

  The one on the facing page, however,

  who looks at me over her bare shoulder,

  cannot hide the shadow of annoyance in her brow.

  You have interrupted me,

  she seems to be saying,

  with your coughing and your loud music.

  Now please leave me alone;

  let me finish whatever it was I was doing

  in my organza-trimmed

  whisperweight camisole with

  keyhole closure and a point d’esprit mesh back.

  I wet my thumb and flip the page.

  Here, the one who happens to be reclining

  in a satin and lace merry widow

  with an inset lace-up front,

  decorated underwire cups and bodice

  with lace ruffles along the bottom

  and hook-and-eye closure in the back,

  is wearing a slightly contorted expression,

  her head thrust back, mouth partially open,

  a confusing mixture of pain and surprise

  as if she had stepped on a tack

  just as I was breaking down

  her bedroom door with my shoulder.

  Nor does the one directly beneath her

  look particularly happy to see me.

  She is arching one eyebrow slightly

  as if to say, so what if I am wearing nothing

  but this stretch panne velvet bodysuit

  with a low sweetheart neckline

  featuring molded cups and adjustable straps.

  Do you have a problem with that?!

  The one on the far right is easier to take,

  her eyes half-closed

  as if she were listening to a medley

  of lullabies playing faintly on a music box.

  Soon she will drop off to sleep,

  her head nestled in the soft crook of her arm,

  and later she will wake up in her

  Spandex slip dress with the high side slit,

  deep scoop neckline, elastic shirring,

  and concealed back zip and vent.

  But opposite her,

  stretched out catlike on a couch

  in the warm glow of a paneled library,

  is one who wears a distinctly challenging expression,

  her face tipped up, exposing

  her long neck, her perfectly flared nostrils.

  Go ahead, her expression tells me,

  take off my satin charmeuse g
own

  with a sheer, jacquard bodice

  decorated with a touch of shimmering Lurex.

  Go ahead, fling it into the fireplace.

  What do I care, her eyes say, we’re all going to hell anyway.

  I have other mail to open,

  but I cannot help noticing her neighbor

  whose eyes are downcast,

  her head ever so demurely bowed to the side

  as if she were the model who sat for Correggio

  when he painted “The Madonna of St. Jerome,”

  only it became so ungodly hot in Parma

  that afternoon, she had to remove

  the traditional blue robe

  and pose there in his studio

  in a beautifully shaped satin teddy

  with an embossed V-front,

  princess seaming to mold the bodice,

  and puckered knit detail.

  And occupying the whole facing page

  is one who displays that expression

  we have come to associate with photographic beauty.

  Yes, she is pouting about something,

  all lower lip and cheekbone.

  Perhaps her ice cream has tumbled

  out of its cone onto the parquet floor.

  Perhaps she has been waiting all day

  for a new sofa to be delivered,

  waiting all day in a stretch lace hipster

  with lattice edging, satin frog closures,

  velvet scrollwork, cuffed ankles,

  flare silhouette, and knotted shoulder straps

  available in black, champagne, almond,

  cinnabar, plum, bronze, mocha,

  peach, ivory, caramel, blush, butter, rose, and periwinkle.

  It is, of course, impossible to say,

  impossible to know what she is thinking,

  why her mouth is the shape of petulance.

  But this is already too much.

  Who has the time to linger on these delicate

  lures, these once unmentionable things?

  Life is rushing by like a mad, swollen river.

  One minute roses are opening in the garden

  and the next, snow is flying past my window.

  Plus the phone is ringing.

  The dog is whining at the door.

  Rain is beating on the roof.

  And as always there is a list of things I have to do

  before the night descends, black and silky,

  and the dark hours begin to hurtle by,

  before the little doors of the body swing shut

  and I ride to sleep, my closed eyes

  still burning from all the glossy lights of day.

  Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles

  from Tintern Abbey

  I was here before, a long time ago,

  and now I am here again

  is an observation that occurs in poetry

  as frequently as rain occurs in life.

  The fellow may be gazing

  over an English landscape,

  hillsides dotted with sheep,

  a row of tall trees topping the downs,

  or he could be moping through the shadows

  of a dark Bavarian forest,

  a wedge of cheese and a volume of fairy tales

  tucked into his rucksack.

  But the feeling is always the same.

  It was better the first time.

  This time is not nearly as good.

  I’m not feeling as chipper as I did back then.

  Something is always missing—

  swans, a glint on the surface of a lake,

  some minor but essential touch.

  Or the quality of things has diminished.

  The sky was a deeper, more dimensional blue,

  clouds were more cathedral-like,

  and water rushed over rock

  with greater effervescence.

  From our chairs we have watched

  the poor author in his waistcoat

  as he recalls the dizzying icebergs of childhood

  and mills around in a field of weeds.

  We have heard the poets long dead

  declaim their dying

  from a promontory, a riverbank,

  next to a haycock, within a copse.

  We have listened to their dismay,

  the kind that issues from poems

  the way water issues forth from hoses,

  the way the match always gives its little speech on fire.

  And when we put down the book at last,

  lean back, close our eyes,

  stinging with print,

  and slip in the bookmark of sleep,

  we will be schooled enough to know

  that when we wake up

  a little before dinner

  things will not be nearly as good as they once were.

  Something will be missing

  from this long, coffin-shaped room,

  the walls and windows now

  only two different shades of gray,

  the glossy gardenia drooping

  in its chipped terra-cotta pot.

  And on the floor, shoes, socks,

  the browning core of an apple.

  Nothing will be as it was

  a few hours ago, back in the glorious past

  before our naps, back in that Golden Age

  that drew to a close sometime shortly after lunch.

  Paradelle for Susan

  I remember the quick, nervous bird of your love.

  I remember the quick, nervous bird of your love.

  Always perched on the thinnest, highest branch.

  Always perched on the thinnest, highest branch.

  Thinnest love, remember the quick branch.

  Always nervous, I perched on your highest bird the.

  It is time for me to cross the mountain.

  It is time for me to cross the mountain.

  And find another shore to darken with my pain.

  And find another shore to darken with my pain.

  Another pain for me to darken the mountain.

  And find the time, cross my shore, to with it is to.

  The weather warm, the handwriting familiar.

  The weather warm, the handwriting familiar.

  Your letter flies from my hand into the waters below.

  Your letter flies from my hand into the waters below.

  The familiar waters below my warm hand.

  Into handwriting your weather flies you letter the from the.

  I always cross the highest letter, the thinnest bird.

  Below the waters of my warm familiar pain,

  Another hand to remember your handwriting.

  The weather perched for me on the shore.

  Quick, your nervous branch flew from love.

  Darken the mountain, time and find was my into it

  was with to to.

  NOTE: The paradelle is one of the more demanding French fixed forms, first appearing in the langue d’oc love poetry of the eleventh century. It is a poem of four six-line stanzas in which the first and second lines, as well as the third and fourth lines of the first three stanzas, must be identical. The fifth and sixth lines, which traditionally resolve these stanzas, must use all the words from the preceding lines and only those words. Similarly, the final stanza must use every word from all the preceding stanzas and only those words.

  Lines Lost Among Trees

  These are not the lines that came to me

  while walking in the woods

  with no pen

  and nothing to write on anyway.

  They are gone forever,

  a handful of coins

  dropped through the grate of memory,

  along with the ingenious mnemonic

  I devised to hold them in place—

  all gone and forgotten

  before I had returned to the clearing of lawn

  in back of our quiet house

  with its jars jammed with pens,

/>   its notebooks and reams of blank paper,

  its desk and soft lamp,

  its table and the light from its windows.

  So this is my elegy for them,

  those six or eight exhalations,

  the braided rope of the syntax,

  the jazz of the timing,

  and the little insight at the end

  wagging like the short tail

  of a perfectly obedient spaniel

  sitting by the door.

  This is my envoy to nothing

  where I say Go, little poem—

  not out into the world of strangers’ eyes,

  but off to some airy limbo,

  home to lost epics,

  unremembered names,

  and fugitive dreams

  such as the one I had last night,

  which, like a fantastic city in pencil,

  erased itself

  in the bright morning air

  just as I was waking up.

  Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes

  First, her tippet made of tulle,

  easily lifted off her shoulders and laid

  on the back of a wooden chair.

  And her bonnet,

  the bow undone with a light forward pull.

  Then the long white dress, a more

  complicated matter with mother-of-pearl

  buttons down the back,

  so tiny and numerous that it takes forever

  before my hands can part the fabric,

  like a swimmer’s dividing water,

  and slip inside.

  You will want to know

  that she was standing

  by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,

  motionless, a little wide-eyed,

  looking out at the orchard below,

  the white dress puddled at her feet

  on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

  The complexity of women’s undergarments

  in nineteenth-century America

  is not to be waved off,

  and I proceeded like a polar explorer

  through clips, clasps, and moorings,

  catches, straps, and whalebone stays,

  sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

  Later, I wrote in a notebook

  it was like riding a swan into the night,

  but, of course, I cannot tell you everything—

  the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,

  how her hair tumbled free of its pins,

  how there were sudden dashes

  whenever we spoke.

  What I can tell you is

  it was terribly quiet in Amherst

  that Sabbath afternoon,

  nothing but a carriage passing the house,

  a fly buzzing in a windowpane.