Aimless Love

by Billy Collins

  wondering what shirt I would put on that day,

  what zinc-covered bar I would stand at

  with my Herald-Tribune and a cup of strong coffee.

  After a lot of squawking, he would fly

  back into the sky leaving only the sound

  of a metal store-front being raised

  or a scooter zipping by outside,

  which was my signal

  to stand up in the cloudy water

  and reach for a towel,

  time to start concentrating on which way

  I would turn after I had locked the front door,

  what shop signs I would see,

  what bridges I would lean on

  to watch the broad river undulating

  like a long-playing record under the needle of my eye.

  Time to stand dripping wet and wonder

  about the hordes of people

  I would pass in the street, mostly people

  whose existence I did not believe in,

  but a few whom I would glance at

  and see my whole life

  the way you see the ocean from the shore.

  One morning after another,

  I would fan myself dry with a towel

  and wonder about what paintings

  I would stand before that day,

  looking forward to the usual—

  the sumptuous reclining nudes,

  the knife next to a wedge of cheese,

  a landscape with pale blue mountains,

  the heads and shoulders of gods

  struggling with one another,

  a foot crushing a snake—

  but always hopeful for something new

  like yesterday’s white turkeys in a field

  or the single stalk of asparagus on a plate

  in a small gilded frame,

  always ready, now that I am dressed,

  to cheer the boats of the beautiful,

  the boats of the strange,

  as they float down the river of this momentous day.

  Istanbul

  It was a pleasure to enter by a side street

  in the center of the city

  a bathhouse said to be 300 years old,

  old enough to have opened the pores of Florence Nightingale

  and soaped the musical head of Franz Liszt.

  And it was a pleasure to drink

  cold wine by a low wood fire

  before being directed to a small room in an upper gallery,

  a room with a carpet and a narrow bed

  where I folded my clothes into a pile

  then came back down, naked

  except for a gauzy striped cloth tucked around my waist.

  It was an odd and eye-opening sensation

  to be led by a man with close-cropped hair

  and spaces between his teeth

  into a steamy marble rotunda

  and to lie there alone on the smooth marble

  watching the droplets fall through the beams

  of natural light in the high dome

  and later to hear the song I sang—

  “She Thinks I Still Care”—echo up into the ceiling.

  I felt like the last of the sultans

  when the man returned and began to scrub me—

  to lather and douse me, scour and shampoo me,

  and splash my drenched body

  with fresh warm water scooped from a marble basin.

  But it was not until he sudsed me

  behind my ears and between my toes

  that I felt myself filling with gratitude

  the way a cloud fills with rain,

  the way a glass pipe slowly fills with smoke.

  In silence I thanked the man

  who scrubbed the bottoms of my feet.

  I thanked the history of the Turkish bath

  and the long chain of bathmen standing unshaven,

  arms folded, waiting for the next customer

  to come through the swinging doors of frosted glass.

  I thanked everyone whose job

  it ever was to lay hands on the skin of strangers,

  and I gave general thanks that I was lying

  facedown in a warm puddle of soap

  and not a warm puddle of blood

  in some corner of this incomprehensible city.

  As one bucket after another

  of warm water was poured over my lowered head,

  I stopped thinking of who and what to thank

  and rode out on a boat of joy,

  a blue boat of marble and soap,

  rode out to the entrance of the harbor

  where I raised a finger of good-bye

  then felt the boat begin to rise and fall

  as it met the roll of the incoming waves,

  bearing my body, my clean, blessed body out to sea.

  Love

  The boy at the far end of the train car

  kept looking behind him

  as if he were afraid or expecting someone

  and then she appeared in the glass door

  of the forward car and he rose

  and opened the door and let her in

  and she entered the car carrying

  a large black case

  in the unmistakable shape of a cello.

  She looked like an angel with a high forehead

  and somber eyes and her hair

  was tied up behind her neck with a black bow.

  And because of all that,

  he seemed a little awkward

  in his happiness to see her,

  whereas she was simply there,

  perfectly existing as a creature

  with a soft face who played the cello.

  And the reason I am writing this

  on the back of a manila envelope

  now that they have left the train together

  is to tell you that when she turned

  to lift the large, delicate cello

  onto the overhead rack,

  I saw him looking up at her

  and what she was doing

  the way the eyes of saints are painted

  when they are looking up at God

  when he is doing something remarkable,

  something that identifies him as God.

  Obituaries

  These are no pages for the young,

  who are better off in one another’s arms,

  nor for those who just need to know

  about the price of gold,

  or a hurricane that is ripping up the Keys.

  But eventually you may join

  the crowd who turn here first to see

  who has fallen in the night,

  who has left a shape of air walking in their place.

  Here is where the final cards are shown,

  the age, the cause, the plaque of deeds,

  and sometimes an odd scrap of news—

  that she collected sugar bowls,

  that he played solitaire without any clothes.

  And all the survivors huddle at the end

  under the roof of a paragraph

  as if they had sidestepped the flame of death.

  What better way to place a thin black frame

  around the things of the morning—

  the hand-painted cup,

  the hemispheres of a cut orange,

  the slant of sunlight on the table?

  And sometimes a most peculiar pair turns up,

  strange roommates lying there

  side by side upon the page—

  Arthur Godfrey next to Man Ray,

  Ken Kesey by the side of Dale Evans.

  It is enough to bring to mind an ark of death,

  not the couples of the animal kingdom,

  but rather pairs of men and women

  ascending the gangplank two by two,

  a surgeon and a model,

  a balloonist and a metal worker,

  an archeologist and an authority on pain.

  Arm-
in-arm, they get on board

  then join the others leaning on the rails,

  all saved at last from the awful flood of life—

  so many of them every day

  there would have to be many arks,

  an armada to ferry the dead

  over the heavy waters that roll beyond the world,

  and many Noahs too,

  bearded and fiercely browed, vigilant up there at every prow.

  Today

  If ever there were a spring day so perfect,

  so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

  that it made you want to throw

  open all the windows in the house

  and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage,

  indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

  a day when the cool brick paths

  and the garden sprouting tulips

  seemed so etched in sunlight

  that you felt like taking

  a hammer to the glass paperweight

  on the living room end table,

  releasing the inhabitants

  from their snow-covered cottage

  so they could walk out,

  holding hands and squinting

  into this larger dome of blue and white,

  well, today is just that kind of day.

  Creatures

  Hamlet noticed them in the shapes of clouds,

  but I saw them in the furniture of childhood,

  creatures trapped under surfaces of wood,

  one submerged in a polished sideboard,

  one frowning from a chair-back,

  another howling from my mother’s silent bureau,

  locked in the grain of maple, frozen in oak.

  I would see these presences, too,

  in a swirling pattern of wallpaper

  or in the various greens of a porcelain lamp,

  each looking so melancholy, so damned,

  some peering out at me as if they knew

  all the secrets of a secretive boy.

  Many times I would be daydreaming

  on the carpet and one would appear next to me,

  the oversize nose, the hollow look.

  So you will understand my reaction

  this morning at the beach

  when you opened your hand to show me

  a stone you had picked up from the shoreline.

  “Do you see the face?” you asked

  as the cold surf circled our bare ankles.

  “There’s the eye and the line of the mouth,

  like it’s grimacing, like it’s in pain.”

  “Well, maybe that’s because it has a fissure

  running down the length of its forehead

  not to mention a kind of twisted beak,” I said,

  taking the thing from you and flinging it out

  over the sparkle of blue waves

  so it could live out its freakish existence

  on the dark bottom of the sea

  and stop bothering innocent beach-goers like us,

  stop ruining everyone’s summer.

  Tipping Point

  At home, the jazz station plays all day,

  so sometimes it becomes indistinct,

  like the sound of rain,

  birds in the background, the surf of traffic.

  But today I heard a voice announce

  that Eric Dolphy, 36 when he died,

  has now been dead for 36 years.

  I wonder—

  did anyone sense something

  when another Eric Dolphy lifetime

  was added to the span of his life,

  when we all took another

  full Dolphy step forward in time,

  flipped over the Eric Dolphy yardstick once again?

  It would have been so subtle—

  like the sensation you might feel

  as you passed through the moment

  at the exact center of your life

  or as you crossed the equator at night in a boat.

  I never gave it another thought,

  but could that have been the little shift

  I sensed a while ago

  as I walked down in the rain to get the mail?

  Nine Horses

  For my birthday,

  my wife gave me nine horse heads,

  ghostly photographs on squares of black marble,

  nine squares set in one large square,

  a thing so heavy that the artist himself

  volunteered to hang it

  from a wood beam against a white stone wall.

  Pale heads of horses in profile

  as if a flashcube had caught them walking in the night.

  Pale horse heads

  that overlook my reading chair,

  the eyes so hollow they must be weeping,

  the mouths so agape they could be dead—

  the photographer standing over them

  on a floor of straw, his black car parked by the stable door.

  Nine white horses,

  or one horse the camera has multiplied by nine.

  It hardly matters, such sadness is gathered here

  in their long white faces

  so far from the pasture and the cube of sugar—

  the face of St. Bartholomew, the face of St. Agnes.

  Odd team of horses,

  pulling nothing,

  look down on these daily proceedings.

  Look down upon this table and these glasses,

  the furled napkins,

  the evening wedding of the knife and fork.

  Look down like a nine-headed god

  and give us a sign of your displeasure

  or your gentle forbearance

  so that we may rejoice in the error of our ways.

  Look down on this ring

  of candles flickering under your pale heads.

  Let your suffering eyes

  and your anonymous deaths

  be the bridle that keeps us from straying from each other

  be the cinch that fastens us to the belly of each day

  as it gallops away, hooves sparking into the night.

  Litany

  You are the bread and the knife,

  The crystal goblet and the wine…

  —Jacques Crickillon

  You are the bread and the knife,

  the crystal goblet and the wine.

  You are the dew on the morning grass

  and the burning wheel of the sun.

  You are the white apron of the baker

  and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

  However, you are not the wind in the orchard,

  the plums on the counter,

  or the house of cards.

  And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.

  There is no way you are the pine-scented air.

  It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,

  maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,

  but you are not even close

  to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

  And a quick look in the mirror will show

  that you are neither the boots in the corner

  nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

  It might interest you to know,

  speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,

  that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

  I also happen to be the shooting star,

  the evening paper blowing down an alley,

  and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

  I am also the moon in the trees

  and the blind woman’s tea cup.

  But don’t worry, I am not the bread and the knife.

  You are still the bread and the knife.

  You will always be the bread and the knife,

  not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

  The Literary Life

  I woke up this morning,

  as the blues singers like to boast,

 
; and the first thing to enter my mind,

  as the dog was licking my face, was Coventry Patmore.

  Who was Coventry Patmore?

  I wondered, as I rose

  and set out on my journey to the encyclopedia

  passing some children and a bottle cap on the way.

  Everything seemed more life-size than usual.

  Light in the shape of windows

  hung on the walls next to the paintings

  of birds and horses, flowers and fish.

  Coventry Patmore,

  I’m coming to get you, I hissed,

  as I entered the library like a man stepping

  into a freight elevator of science and wisdom.

  How many things have I looked up

  in a lifetime of looking things up?

  I wondered, as I set the book on the piano

  and began turning its large, weightless pages.

  How would the world look

  if all of its things were neatly arranged

  in alphabetical order? I wondered,

  as I found the P section and began zeroing in.

  How long before I would forget Coventry Patmore’s

  dates and the title of his long poem

  on the sanctity of married love?

  I asked myself as I closed the door to that room

  and stood for a moment in the kitchen,

  taking in the silvery toaster, the bowl of lemons,

  and the white cat, looking as if

  he had just finished his autobiography.