Sailing Alone Around the Room

by Billy Collins

  It makes no difference whether I lie

  staring at the ceiling

  or pace the living-room floor,

  he keeps on making his furious rounds,

  little pedaler in his frenzy,

  my own worst enemy, my oldest friend.

  What is there to do but close my eyes

  and watch him circling the night,

  schoolboy in an ill-fitting jacket,

  leaning forward, his cap on backwards,

  wringing the handlebars,

  maintaining a certain speed?

  Does anything exist at this hour

  in this nest of dark rooms

  but the spectacle of him

  and the hope that before dawn

  I can lift out some curious detail

  that will carry me off to sleep—

  the watch that encircles his pale wrist,

  the expandable band,

  the tiny hands that keep pointing this way and that.

  Madmen

  They say you can jinx a poem

  if you talk about it before it is done.

  If you let it out too early, they warn,

  your poem will fly away,

  and this time they are absolutely right.

  Take the night I mentioned to you

  I wanted to write about the madmen,

  as the newspapers so blithely call them,

  who attack art, not in reviews,

  but with breadknives and hammers

  in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.

  Actually, they are the real artists,

  you said, spinning the ice in your glass.

  The screwdriver is their brush.

  The restorers are the true vandals,

  you went on, slowly turning me upside-down,

  the ones in the white smocks

  always closing the wound in the landscape

  and ruining the art of the mad.

  I watched my poem fly down to the front

  of the bar and hover there

  until the next customer walked in—

  then I watched it fly out the door into the night

  and sail away, I could only imagine,

  over the dark tenements of the city.

  All I had wished to say

  was that art, too, was short,

  as a razor can teach with a blind slash;

  it only seems long when you compare it to life,

  but that night I drove home alone

  with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart

  but the faint hope that I might catch

  in the fan of my headlights

  a glimpse of the thing,

  maybe perched on a road sign or a streetlamp—

  poor unwritten bird, its wings folded,

  staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.

  Sonnet

  All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,

  and after this one just a dozen

  to launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas,

  then only ten more left like rows of beans.

  How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan

  and insist the iambic bongos must be played

  and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,

  one for every station of the cross.

  But hang on here while we make the turn

  into the final six where all will be resolved,

  where longing and heartache will find an end,

  where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,

  take off those crazy medieval tights,

  blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

  Idiomatic

  It is a big question to pose so early in the morning

  or “in the light woven by birds,”

  as the Estonians say,

  but still I must ask what is my place in life?

  my “seat on the invisible train,”

  as they say in Hungary.

  I mean why am I just sitting here

  in a lawn chair listening to a thrush,

  “the little entertainer of the woods,”

  as the Swiss call him,

  while out there in the world

  mobs of people are rushing over bridges

  in and out of the cities?

  Vegetables grow heavy in their fields,

  clouds fly across the “face of the earth,”

  as we call it in English,

  and sometimes rockets lift off in the distance—

  and I mean that quite literally,

  “from the top of the table” as the Portuguese have it,

  real rockets rising from the horizon,

  or “the big line,” if you’re an Australian,

  leaving behind rich gowns of exhaust smoke,

  long, smooth trajectories,

  and always the ocean below,

  “the water machine,” as the South Sea islanders put it—

  everything taking place right on schedule,

  “by the clock of the devil,”

  as our grandparents were fond of saying.

  And still here I sit with my shirt off,

  the dog at my side, daydreaming—

  “juggling balls of cotton,” as they like to say in France.

  The Waitress

  She brings a drink to the table,

  pivots, and turns away

  with a smile

  and soon she brings me

  a menu, smiles,

  and takes the empty glass away.

  She brings me a fillet of sole

  on a plate with parsley

  and thin wheels of lemon,

  then more bread in a basket,

  smiling as she walks away,

  then comes back

  to see if everything is OK

  to fill my glass with wine,

  turning away

  then circling back to my table

  until she is every waitress

  who has ever served me,

  and every waiter, too,

  young and old,

  the eager and the sleepy ones alike.

  I hold my fork in the air—

  the blades of the fans

  turn slowly on the ceiling—

  and I begin to picture them all,

  living and dead,

  gathered together for one night

  in an amphitheater, or armory

  or some vast silvery ballroom

  where they have come

  to remove their bow ties,

  to hang up their red jackets and aprons,

  and now they are having a cigarette

  or dancing with each other,

  turning slowly in one another’s arms

  to a five-piece, rented band.

  And that is all I can think about

  after I pay the bill,

  leave a large, sentimental tip,

  then walk into the fluorescent streets,

  collar up against the chill—

  all the waitresses and waiters of my life,

  until the night makes me realize

  that this place where they pace and dance

  under colored lights,

  is made of nothing but autumn leaves,

  red, yellow, gold,

  waiting for a sudden gust of wind

  to scatter it all

  into the dark spaces

  beyond these late-night, practically empty streets.

  The Butterfly Effect

  The one resting now on a plant stem

  somewhere deep in the vine-hung

  interior of South America

  whose wings are about to flutter

  thus causing it to rain heavily

  on your wedding day

  several years from now,

  and spinning you down

  a path to calamity and ruin

  is—if it’s any consolation—

  a gorgeous swallowtail,

  a brilliant mix of bright orange
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  and vivid yellow with a soft

  dusting of light brown along the edges.

  What’s more, the two black dots

  on the wings are so prominent

  as to make one wonder

  if this is not an example of mimicry,

  an adaptation technique whereby one species

  takes on the appearance

  of another less-edible one,

  first brought to light,

  it might interest you to know

  and possibly distract you from

  your vexatious dread

  with regards to the hopelessness of the future,

  by two British naturalists, namely,

  H.W. Bates in 1862 and A. R. Wallace in 1865.

  Serenade

  Let the other boys from the village

  gather under your window

  and strum their bean-shaped guitars.

  Let them huddle under your balcony

  heavy with flowers,

  and fill the night with their longing—

  locals in luminous shirts,

  yodeling over their three simple chords,

  hoping for a glimpse of your moonlit arm.

  Meanwhile, I will bide my time

  and continue my lessons on the zither

  and my study of the miniature bassoon.

  Every morning I will walk the corridor

  to the music room

  lined with the fierce portraits of my ancestors

  knowing there is nothing like practice

  to devour the hours of life—

  sheets of music floating down,

  a double reed in my mouth

  or my fingers curled

  over a row of wakeful strings.

  And if this is not enough

  to rouse you from your light sleep

  and lure you through the open doors,

  I will apply myself to the pyrophone,

  the double-lap dulcimer,

  the glassarina, and the tiny thumb piano.

  I will be the strange one,

  the pale eccentric

  who wears the same clothes every day,

  the one at the train station

  carrying the black case

  shaped like nothing you have seen before.

  I will be the irresistible misfit

  who sends up over a ledge of flowers

  sounds no woman has ever heard—

  the one who longs to see your face

  framed by bougainvillea,

  perplexed but full of charity,

  looking down at me as I finger

  a nameless instrument

  it took so many days and nights to invent.

  The Three Wishes

  Because he has been hungry for days,

  the woodsman wishes for a skillet of hot sausages

  and because she is infuriated at his stupidity,

  his lack of vision, shall we say,

  his wife wishes the skillet would stick to his nose,

  and so the last wish must also be squandered

  by asking the genie to please

  remove the heavy iron pan from the poor man’s face.

  Hovering in the smoke that wafts up

  from his exotic green bottle,

  the genie knew all along the couple

  would never escape their miserable lot—

  the cheerless hovel, the thin dog in the corner,

  cold skillet on a cold stove—

  and we knew this too, looking down from

  the cloud of a sofa into the world of a book.

  The man is a fool, it is easily said.

  He could have wished for a million gold coins

  as his wife will remind him hourly

  for the rest of their rueful lives,

  or a million golden skillets

  if he had a little imaginative flair,

  and that is the cinder of truth

  the story wishes to place in one of our shoes.

  Nothing can come from nothing,

  I nod with the rest of the congregation.

  Three wishes is three wishes too many,

  I mutter piously as I look up from the story.

  But every time I think of it,

  all I ever really feel besides a quiver

  of sympathy for the poor woodsman

  is a gnawing hunger for sausages—

  a sudden longing for a winter night,

  a light snow falling outside,

  my ax leaning by the door,

  my devoted, heavyset wife at the stove,

  and a skillet full of sizzling sausages,

  maybe some green peppers and onions,

  and for my seventh and final wish,

  a decent bottle of Italian, no, wait … make that Chilean red.

  Pavilion

  I sit in the study,

  simple walls, complicated design of carpet.

  I read a book with a bright red cover.

  I write something down.

  I look up a fact in an encyclopedia

  and copy it onto a card,

  the lamp burning,

  a painting leaning against a chair.

  I find a word in a dictionary

  and copy it onto the back of an envelope,

  the piano heavy in the corner,

  the fan turning slowly overhead.

  Such is life in this pavilion

  of paper and ink

  where a cup of tea is cooling,

  where the windows darken then fill with light.

  But I have had enough of it—

  the slope of paper on the desk,

  books on the floor like water lilies,

  the jasmine drying out in its pot.

  In fact, I am ready to die,

  ready to return as something else,

  like a brown-and-white dog

  with his head always out the car window.

  Then maybe, if you were still around,

  walking along a street in linen clothes,

  a portfolio under your arm,

  you would see me go by,

  my eyes closed,

  wet nose twitching,

  my ears blown back,

  a kind of smile on my long dark lips.

  The Movies

  I would like to watch a movie tonight

  in which a stranger rides into town

  or where someone embarks on a long journey,

  a movie with the promise of danger,

  danger visited upon the citizens of the town

  by the stranger who rides in,

  or the danger that will befall the person

  on his or her long hazardous journey—

  it hardly matters to me

  so long as I am not in danger,

  and not much danger lies in watching

  a movie, you might as well agree.

  I would prefer to watch this movie at home

  than walk out in the cold to a theater

  and stand on line for a ticket.

  I want to watch it lying down

  with the bed hitched up to the television

  the way they’d hitch up a stagecoach

  to a team of horses

  so the movie could pull me along

  the crooked, dusty road of its adventures.

  I would stay out of harm’s way

  by identifying with characters

  like the bartender in the movie about the stranger

  who rides into town,

  the fellow who knows enough to duck

  when a chair shatters the mirror over the bar.

  Or the stationmaster

  in the movie about the perilous journey,

  the fellow who fishes a gold watch from his pocket,

  helps a lady onto the train,

  and hands up a heavy satchel

  to the man with the mustache

  and the dangerous eyes,

  waving the all-clear to the engineer.

  Then the train would pull
out of the station

  and the movie would continue without me.

  And at the end of the day

  I would hang up my oval hat on a hook

  and take the shortcut home to my two dogs,

  my faithful, amorous wife, and my children—

  Molly, Lucinda, and Harold, Jr.

  Jealousy

  It is not the tilted buildings or the blind alleys

  that I mind,

  nor the winding staircases leading nowhere

  or the ones that are simply missing.

  Nor is walking through a foreign city

  with a ring of a thousand keys

  looking for the one door the worst of it,

  nor the blank maps I am offered by strangers.

  I can even tolerate your constant running

  away from me, slipping around corners,

  rising in the cage of an elevator,

  squinting out the rear window of a taxi,

  and always on the arm of a tall man

  in a beautiful suit

  and a perfectly furled hat

  whom I know is carrying a gun.

  What kills me is the way you lie there

  in the morning, eyes closed,

  curled into a sweet ball of sleep

  and that innocent look on your face

  when you tell me over coffee and oranges

  that really you were right there all night

  next to me in bed

  and then expect me to believe you

  were lost in your own dreamworld,

  some ridiculous alibi

  involving swimming through clouds

  to the pealing of bells,

  a transparent white lie about leaping

  from a high window ledge

  then burying your face

  in the plumage of an angel.

  Tomes

  There is a section in my library for death

  and another for Irish history,

  a few shelves for the poetry of China and Japan,

  and in the center a row of reference books,

  solid and imperturbable,

  the ones you can turn to anytime,

  when the night is going wrong

  or when the day is full of empty promise.

  I have nothing against

  the thin monograph, the odd query,

  a note on the identity of Chekhov’s dentist—

  but what I prefer on days like these

  is to get up from the couch,

  pull down The History of the World,

  and hold in my hands a book

  containing almost everything