Sailing Alone Around the Room

by Billy Collins

  So I could plainly hear her inhale

  when I undid the very top

  hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

  and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,

  the way some readers sigh when they realize

  that Hope has feathers,

  that Reason is a plank,

  that Life is a loaded gun

  that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

  The Night House

  Every day the body works in the fields of the world

  mending a stone wall

  or swinging a sickle through the tall grass—

  the grass of civics, the grass of money—

  and every night the body curls around itself

  and listens for the soft bells of sleep.

  But the heart is restless and rises

  from the body in the middle of the night,

  leaves the trapezoidal bedroom

  with its thick, pictureless walls

  to sit by herself at the kitchen table

  and heat some milk in a pan.

  And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe

  and goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,

  and opens a book on engineering.

  Even the conscience awakens

  and roams from room to room in the dark,

  darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.

  And the soul is up on the roof

  in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,

  singing a song about the wildness of the sea

  until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.

  Then, they all will return to the sleeping body

  the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,

  resuming their daily colloquy,

  talking to each other or themselves

  even through the heat of the long afternoons.

  Which is why the body—that house of voices—

  sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen

  to stare into the distance,

  to listen to all its names being called

  before bending again to its labor.

  Splitting Wood

  Frost covered this decades ago,

  and frost will cover it again tonight,

  the leafy disarray of this woodland

  now thinned down to half its trees,

  but this morning I stand here

  sweating in a thin shirt

  as I split a stack of ash logs

  into firewood

  with two wedges, an ax, and a blue-headed maul.

  The pleasures here are well known:

  the feet planted wide,

  the silent unstoppable flow of the downswing,

  the coordination that is called hand-eye,

  because the hand achieves

  whatever the concupiscent eye desires

  when it longs for a certain spot,

  which, in this case, is the slightest fissure

  visible at one end of the log

  where the thin, insinuating edge

  of the blade can gain entry,

  where the shape of its will can be done.

  I want to say there is nothing

  like the sudden opening of wood,

  but it is like so many other things—

  the stroke of the ax like lightning,

  the bisection so perfect

  the halves fall away from each other

  as in a mirror,

  and hit the soft ground

  like twins shot through the heart.

  And rarely, if the wood

  accepts the blade without conditions,

  the two pieces keep their balance

  in spite of the blow,

  remain stunned on the block

  as if they cannot believe their division,

  their sudden separateness.

  Still upright, still together,

  they wobble slightly

  as two lovers, once secretly bound,

  might stand revealed,

  more naked than ever,

  the darkness inside the tree they shared

  now instantly exposed to the blunt

  light of this clear November day,

  all the inner twisting of the grain

  that held them blindly

  in their augmentation and contortion

  now rushed into this brightness

  as if by a shutter

  that, once opened, can never be closed.

  The Death of the Hat

  Once every man wore a hat.

  In the ashen newsreels,

  the avenues of cities

  are broad rivers flowing with hats.

  The ballparks swelled

  with thousands of straw hats,

  brims and bands,

  rows of men smoking

  and cheering in shirtsleeves.

  Hats were the law.

  They went without saying.

  You noticed a man without a hat in a crowd.

  You bought them from Adams or Dobbs

  who branded your initials in gold

  on the inside band.

  Trolleys crisscrossed the city.

  Steamships sailed in and out of the harbor.

  Men with hats gathered on the docks.

  There was a person to block your hat

  and a hatcheck girl to mind it

  while you had a drink

  or ate a steak with peas and a baked potato.

  In your office stood a hat rack.

  The day war was declared

  everyone in the street was wearing a hat.

  And they were wearing hats

  when a ship loaded with men sank in the icy sea.

  My father wore one to work every day

  and returned home

  carrying the evening paper,

  the winter chill radiating from his overcoat.

  But today we go bareheaded

  into the winter streets,

  stand hatless on frozen platforms.

  Today the mailboxes on the roadside

  and the spruce trees behind the house

  wear cold white hats of snow.

  Mice scurry from the stone walls at night

  in their thin fur hats

  to eat the birdseed that has spilled.

  And now my father, after a life of work,

  wears a hat of earth,

  and on top of that,

  a lighter one of cloud and sky—a hat of wind.

  Passengers

  At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats

  with the possible company of my death,

  this sprawling miscellany of people—

  carry-on bags and paperbacks—

  that could be gathered in a flash

  into a band of pilgrims on the last open road.

  Not that I think

  if our plane crumpled into a mountain

  we would all ascend together,

  holding hands like a ring of sky divers,

  into a sudden gasp of brightness,

  or that there would be some common spot

  for us to reunite to jubilize the moment,

  some spaceless, pillarless Greece

  where we could, at the count of three,

  toss our ashes into the sunny air.

  It’s just that the way that man has his briefcase

  so carefully arranged,

  the way that girl is cooling her tea,

  and the flow of the comb that woman

  passes through her daughter’s hair …

  and when you consider the altitude,

  the secret parts of the engines,

  and all the hard water and the deep canyons below …

  well, I just think it would be good if one of us

  maybe stood up and said a few words,

  or, so as not to involve the police,

  at least quietly wrote something down.

  Where I Live

  The house sits at
one end of a two-acre trapezoid.

  There is a wide lawn, a long brick path,

  rhododendrons, and large, heavy maples.

  Behind the geometry of the nine rooms,

  the woods run up a hillside;

  and across the road in front

  is a stream called the Plum Brook.

  It must have flowed through an orchard

  that no longer exists.

  Tomorrow early, I will drive down

  and talk to the stonecutter,

  but today I am staying home,

  standing at one window, then another,

  or putting on a jacket

  and wandering around outside

  or sitting in a chair

  watching the trees full of light-green buds

  under the low hood of the sky.

  This is the first good rain to fall

  since my father was buried last week,

  and even though he was very old,

  I am amazed at how the small drops

  stream down the panes of glass,

  as usual,

  gathering,

  as they always have,

  in pools on the ground.

  Aristotle

  This is the beginning.

  Almost anything can happen.

  This is where you find

  the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,

  the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.

  Think of an egg, the letter A,

  a woman ironing on a bare stage

  as the heavy curtain rises.

  This is the very beginning.

  The first-person narrator introduces himself,

  tells us about his lineage.

  The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.

  Here the climbers are studying a map

  or pulling on their long woolen socks.

  This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.

  The profile of an animal is being smeared

  on the wall of a cave,

  and you have not yet learned to crawl.

  This is the opening, the gambit,

  a pawn moving forward an inch.

  This is your first night with her,

  your first night without her.

  This is the first part

  where the wheels begin to turn,

  where the elevator begins its ascent,

  before the doors lurch apart.

  This is the middle.

  Things have had time to get complicated,

  messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.

  Cities have sprouted up along the rivers

  teeming with people at cross-purposes—

  a million schemes, a million wild looks.

  Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack

  here and pitches his ragged tent.

  This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,

  where the action suddenly reverses

  or swerves off in an outrageous direction.

  Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph

  to why Miriam does not want Edward’s child.

  Someone hides a letter under a pillow.

  Here the aria rises to a pitch,

  a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.

  And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge

  halfway up the mountain.

  This is the bridge, the painful modulation.

  This is the thick of things.

  So much is crowded into the middle—

  the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,

  Russian uniforms, noisy parties,

  lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall—

  too much to name, too much to think about.

  And this is the end,

  the car running out of road,

  the river losing its name in an ocean,

  the long nose of the photographed horse

  touching the white electronic line.

  This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,

  the empty wheelchair,

  and pigeons floating down in the evening.

  Here the stage is littered with bodies,

  the narrator leads the characters to their cells,

  and the climbers are in their graves.

  It is me hitting the period

  and you closing the book.

  It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen

  and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.

  This is the final bit

  thinning away to nothing.

  This is the end, according to Aristotle,

  what we have all been waiting for,

  what everything comes down to,

  the destination we cannot help imagining,

  a streak of light in the sky,

  a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.

  New Poems

  Dharma

  The way the dog trots out the front door

  every morning

  without a hat or an umbrella,

  without any money

  or the keys to her doghouse

  never fails to fill the saucer of my heart

  with milky admiration.

  Who provides a finer example

  of a life without encumbrance—

  Thoreau in his curtainless hut

  with a single plate, a single spoon?

  Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?

  Off she goes into the material world

  with nothing but her brown coat

  and her modest blue collar,

  following only her wet nose,

  the twin portals of her steady breathing,

  followed only by the plume of her tail.

  If only she did not shove the cat aside

  every morning

  and eat all his food

  what a model of self-containment she would be,

  what a paragon of earthly detachment.

  If only she were not so eager

  for a rub behind the ears,

  so acrobatic in her welcomes,

  if only I were not her god.

  Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles

  It seems these poets have nothing

  up their ample sleeves

  they turn over so many cards so early,

  telling us before the first line

  whether it is wet or dry,

  night or day, the season the man is standing in,

  even how much he has had to drink.

  Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.

  Maybe it is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.

  “Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune

  on a Cloudy Afternoon” is one of Sun Tung Po’s.

  “Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea”

  is another one, or just

  “On a Boat, Awake at Night.”

  And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with

  “In a Boat on a Summer Evening

  I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird.

  It Was Very Sad and Seemed to be Saying

  My Woman Is Cruel—Moved, I Wrote This Poem”

  There is no iron turnstile to push against here

  as with headings like “Vortex on a String,”

  “The Horn of Neurosis,” or whatever.

  No confusingly inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over.

  Instead, “I Walk Out on a Summer Morning

  to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall”

  is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders.

  And “Ten Days of Spring Rain Have Kept Me Indoors”

  is a servant who shows me into the room

  where a poet with a thin beard

  is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine

  whispering something about clouds and cold wind,

  about sickness and the loss of friends

  How easy he has made it for me to enter
here,

  to sit down in a corner;

  cross my legs like his, and listen.

  Snow Day

  Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,

  its white flag waving over everything,

  the landscape vanished,

  not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,

  and beyond these windows

  the government buildings smothered,

  schools and libraries buried, the post office lost

  under the noiseless drift,

  the paths of trains softly blocked,

  the world fallen under this falling.

  In a while, I will put on some boots

  and step out like someone walking in water,

  and the dog will porpoise through the drifts,

  and I will shake a laden branch

  sending a cold shower down on us both.

  But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house,

  a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow.

  I will make a pot of tea

  and listen to the plastic radio on the counter,

  as glad as anyone to hear the news

  that the Kiddie Corner School is closed,

  the Ding-Dong School, closed.

  the All Aboard Children’s School, closed,

  the Hi-Ho Nursery School, closed,

  along with—some will be delighted to hear—

  the Toadstool School, the Little School,

  Little Sparrows Nursery School,

  Little Stars Pre-School, Peas-and-Carrots Day School

  the Tom Thumb Child Center, all closed,

  and—clap your hands—the Peanuts Play School.

  So this is where the children hide all day,

  These are the nests where they letter and draw,

  where they put on their bright miniature jackets,

  all darting and climbing and sliding,

  all but the few girls whispering by the fence.

  And now I am listening hard

  in the grandiose silence of the snow,

  trying to hear what those three girls are plotting,

  what riot is afoot,

  which small queen is about to be brought down.

  Insomnia

  Even though the house is deeply silent

  and the room, with no moon,

  is perfectly dark,

  even though the body is a sack of exhaustion

  inert on the bed,

  someone inside me will not

  get off his tricycle,

  will not stop tracing the same tight circle

  on the same green threadbare carpet.