Aimless Love

by Billy Collins

  Writing in the Afterlife

  I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,

  shot with pristine light,

  not this sulfurous haze,

  the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.

  Many have pictured a river here,

  but no one mentioned all the boats,

  their benches crowded with naked passengers,

  each bent over a writing tablet.

  I knew I would not always be a child

  with a model train and a model tunnel,

  and I knew I would not live forever,

  jumping all day through the hoop of myself.

  I had heard about the journey to the other side

  and the clink of the final coin

  in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,

  but how could anyone have guessed

  that as soon as we arrived

  we would be asked to describe this place

  and to include as much detail as possible—

  not just the water, he insists,

  rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,

  not simply the shackles, but the rusty,

  iron, ankle-shredding shackles—

  and that our next assignment would be

  to jot down, off the tops of our heads,

  our thoughts and feelings about being dead,

  not really an assignment,

  the man rotating the oar keeps telling us—

  think of it more as an exercise, he groans,

  think of writing as a process,

  a never-ending, infernal process,

  and now the boats have become jammed together,

  bow against stern, stern locked to bow,

  and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.

  No Time

  In a rush this weekday morning,

  I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery

  where my parents lie buried

  side by side under a smooth slab of granite.

  Then, all day long, I think of him rising up

  to give me that look

  of knowing disapproval

  while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.

  Elk River Falls

  is where the Elk River falls

  from a rocky and considerable height,

  turning pale with trepidation at the lip

  (it seemed from where I stood below)

  before it unbuckles from itself

  and plummets, shredded, through the air

  into the shadows of a frigid pool,

  so calm around the edges, a place

  for water to recover from the shock

  of falling apart and coming back together

  before it picks up its song again,

  goes sliding around some massive rocks

  and past some islands overgrown with weeds

  then flattens out, slips around a bend,

  and continues on its winding course,

  according to this camper’s guide,

  then joins the Clearwater at its northern fork

  which leads it all to the distant sea

  where this and every other stream

  mistakes the monster for itself,

  sings its name one final time

  then feels the sudden sting of salt.

  Christmas Sparrow

  The first thing I heard this morning

  was a rapid flapping sound, soft, insistent—

  wings against glass as it turned out

  downstairs when I saw the small bird

  rioting in the frame of a high window,

  trying to hurl itself through

  the enigma of glass into the spacious light.

  Then a noise in the throat of the cat

  who was hunkered on the rug

  told me how the bird had gotten inside,

  carried in the cold night

  through the flap of a basement door,

  and later released from the soft grip of teeth.

  On a chair, I trapped its pulsations

  in a shirt and got it to the door,

  so weightless it seemed

  to have vanished into the nest of cloth.

  But outside, when I uncupped my hands,

  it burst into its element,

  dipping over the dormant garden

  in a spasm of wingbeats

  then disappeared over a row of tall hemlocks.

  For the rest of the day,

  I could feel its wild thrumming

  against my palms as I wondered about

  the hours it must have spent

  pent in the shadows of that room,

  hidden in the spiky branches

  of our decorated tree, breathing there

  among the metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn,

  its eyes open, like mine as I lie in bed tonight

  picturing this rare, lucky sparrow

  tucked into a holly bush now,

  a light snow tumbling through the windless dark.

  Surprise

  This—

  according to the voice on the radio,

  the host of a classical music program no less—

  this is the birthday of Vivaldi.

  He would be 325 years old today—

  quite bent over, I would imagine,

  and not able to see much through his watery eyes.

  Surely, he would be deaf by now,

  the clothes flaking off him,

  hair pitiably sparse.

  But we would throw a party for him anyway,

  a surprise party where everyone

  would hide behind the furniture to listen

  for the tap of his cane on the pavement

  and the sound of that dry, persistent cough.

  Poetry

  Call it a field where the animals

  who were forgotten by the Ark

  come to graze under the evening clouds.

  Or a cistern where the rain that fell

  before history trickles over a concrete lip.

  However you see it,

  this is no place to set up

  the three-legged easel of realism

  or make a reader climb

  over the many fences of a plot.

  Let the portly novelist

  with his noisy typewriter

  describe the city where Francine was born,

  how Albert read the paper on the train,

  how curtains were blowing in the bedroom.

  Let the playwright with her torn cardigan

  and a dog curled on the rug

  move the characters

  from the wings to the stage

  to face the many-eyed darkness of the house.

  Poetry is no place for that.

  We have enough to do

  complaining about the price of tobacco,

  passing the dripping ladle,

  and singing songs to a bird in a cage.

  We are busy doing nothing—

  and all we need for that is an afternoon,

  a rowboat under a blue sky,

  and maybe a man fishing from a stone bridge,

  or, better still, nobody on that bridge at all.

  FROM THE TROUBLE WITH POETRY

  (2005)

  Monday

  The birds are in their trees,

  the toast is in the toaster,

  and the poets are at their windows.

  They are at their windows

  in every section of the tangerine of earth—

  the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,

  the American poets gazing out

  at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.

  The clerks are at their desks,

  the miners are down in their mines,

  and the poets are looking out their windows

  maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,

  and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.

  The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong


  game of proofreading,

  glancing back and forth from page to page,

  the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,

  and the poets are at their windows

  because it is their job for which

  they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

  What window it hardly seems to matter

  though many have a favorite,

  for there is always something to see—

  a bird grasping a thin branch,

  the headlights of a taxi rounding a corner,

  those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.

  The fishermen bob in their boats,

  the linemen climb their round poles,

  the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,

  and the poets continue to stare

  at the cracked birdbath or a limb knocked down by the wind.

  By now, it should go without saying

  that what the oven is to the baker

  and the berry-stained blouse to the drycleaner,

  so the window is to the poet.

  Just think—

  before the invention of the window,

  the poets would have had to put on a jacket

  and a winter hat to go outside

  or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.

  And when I say a wall,

  I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper

  and a sketch of a cow in a frame.

  I mean a cold wall of field stones,

  the wall of the medieval sonnet,

  the original woman’s heart of stone,

  the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover.

  Statues in the Park

  I thought of you today

  when I stopped before an equestrian statue

  in the middle of a public square,

  you who had once instructed me

  in the code of these noble poses.

  A horse rearing up with two legs raised,

  you told me, meant the rider had died in battle.

  If only one leg was lifted,

  the man had elsewhere succumbed to his wounds;

  and if four legs were touching the ground,

  as they were in this case—

  bronze hooves affixed to a stone base—

  it meant that the man on the horse,

  this one staring intently

  over the closed movie theatre across the street,

  had died of a cause other than war.

  In the shadow of the statue,

  I wondered about the others

  who had simply walked through life

  without a horse, a saddle, or a sword—

  pedestrians who could no longer

  place one foot in front of the other.

  I pictured statues of the sickly

  recumbent on their cold stone beds,

  the suicides toeing the marble edge,

  statues of accident victims covering their eyes,

  the murdered covering their wounds,

  the drowned silently treading the air.

  And there was I,

  up on a rosy-gray block of granite

  near a cluster of shade trees in the local park,

  my name and dates pressed into a plaque,

  down on my knees, eyes lifted,

  praying to the passing clouds,

  forever begging in vain for just one more day.

  House

  I lie in a bedroom of a house

  that was built in 1862, we were told—

  the two windows still facing east

  into the bright daily reveille of the sun.

  The early birds are chirping,

  and I think of those who have slept here before,

  the family we bought the house from—

  the five Critchlows—

  and the engineer they told us about

  who lived here alone before them,

  the one who built onto the back

  of the house a large glassy room with wood beams.

  I have an old photograph of the house

  in black and white, a few small trees,

  and a curved dirt driveway,

  but I do not know who lived here then.

  So I go back to the Civil War

  and to the farmer who built the house

  and the rough stone walls

  that encompass the house and run up into the woods,

  he who mounted his thin wife in this room,

  while the war raged to the south,

  with the strength of a dairyman

  or with the tenderness of a dairyman

  or with both, alternating back and forth

  so as to give his wife much pleasure

  and to call down a son to earth

  to take over the cows and the farm

  when he no longer had the strength

  after all the days and nights of toil and prayer—

  the sun breaking over the same horizon

  into these same windows,

  lighting the same bed-space where I lie

  having nothing to farm, and no son,

  only the dead farmer and his dead wife for company,

  feeling better and worse by turns.

  The Long Day

  In the morning I ate a banana

  like a young ape

  and worked on a poem called “Nocturne.”

  In the afternoon I opened the mail

  with a short kitchen knife,

  and when dusk began to fall

  I took off my clothes,

  put on “Sweetheart of the Rodeo”

  and soaked in a claw-footed bathtub.

  I closed my eyes and thought

  about the alphabet,

  the letters filing out of the halls of kindergarten

  to become literature.

  If the British call z zed,

  I wondered, why not call b bed and d dead.

  And why does z, which looks like

  the fastest letter, come at the very end?

  unless they are all moving east

  when we are facing north in our chairs.

  It was then that I heard

  a clap of thunder and the dog’s bark,

  and the claw-footed bathtub

  took one step forward,

  or was it backward

  I had to ask

  as I turned

  to reach for a far-away towel.

  In the Evening

  The heads of roses begin to droop.

  The bee who has been hauling her gold

  all day finds a hexagon in which to rest.

  In the sky, traces of clouds,

  the last few darting birds,

  watercolors on the horizon.

  The white cat sits facing a wall.

  The horse in the field is asleep on its feet.

  I light a candle on the wood table.

  I take another sip of wine.

  I pick up an onion and a knife.

  And the past and the future?

  Nothing but an only child with two different masks.

  Flock

  It has been calculated that each copy of

  the Gutenburg Bible … required the

  skins of 300 sheep.

  —from an article on printing

  I can see them squeezed into the holding pen

  behind the stone building

  where the printing press is housed,

  all of them squirming around

  to find a little room

  and looking so much alike

  it would be nearly impossible

  to count them,

  and there is no telling

  which one will carry the news

  that the Lord is a shepherd,

  one of the few things they already know.

  Building with Its Face Blown Off

  How suddenly the private

  is revealed in a bombed out city,

  how the blue and white striped wal
lpaper

  of a second story bedroom is now

  exposed to the lightly falling snow

  as if the room had answered the explosion

  wearing only its striped pajamas.

  Some neighbors and soldiers

  poke around in the rubble below

  and stare up at the hanging staircase,

  the portrait of a grandfather,

  a door dangling from a single hinge.

  And the bathroom looks almost embarrassed

  by its uncovered ochre walls,

  the twisted mess of its plumbing,

  the sink sinking to its knees,

  the ripped shower curtain,

  the torn goldfish trailing bubbles.

  It’s like a dollhouse view

  as if a child on its knees could reach in

  and pick up the bureau, straighten a picture.

  Or it might be a room on a stage

  in a play with no characters,

  no dialogue or audience,

  no beginning, middle and end—

  just the broken furniture in the street,

  a shoe among the cinder blocks,

  a light snow still falling

  on a distant steeple, and people

  crossing a bridge that still stands.

  And beyond that—crows in a tree,

  the statue of a leader on a horse,

  and clouds that could be smoke,