Aimless Love

by Billy Collins

  I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.

  (detail)

  It was getting late in the year,

  the sky had been low and overcast for days,

  and I was drinking tea in a glassy room

  with a woman without children,

  a gate through which no one had entered the world.

  She was turning the pages of an expensive book

  on a coffee table, even though we were drinking tea,

  a book of colorful paintings—

  a landscape, a portrait, a still life,

  a field, a face, a pear and a knife, all turning on the table.

  Men had entered there but no girl or boy

  had come out, I was thinking oddly

  as she stopped at a page of clouds

  aloft in a pale sky, tinged with red and gold.

  This one is my favorite, she said,

  even though it was only a detail, a corner

  of a larger painting which she had never seen.

  Nor did she want to see the countryside below

  or the portrayal of some myth

  in order for the billowing clouds to seem complete.

  This was enough, this fraction of the whole,

  just as the leafy scene in the windows was enough

  now that the light was growing dim,

  as was she enough, perfectly by herself

  somewhere in the enormous mural of the world.

  Adage

  When it’s late at night and branches

  are banging against the windows,

  you might think that love is just a matter

  of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself

  into the fire of someone else,

  but it’s a little more complicated than that.

  It’s more like trading the two birds

  who might be hiding in that bush

  for the one you are not holding in your hand.

  A wise man once said that love

  was like forcing a horse to drink

  but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.

  Let us be clear about something.

  Love is not as simple as getting up

  on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.

  No, it’s more like the way the pen

  feels after it has defeated the sword.

  It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.

  You look at me through the halo of the last candle

  and tell me love is an ill wind

  that has no turning, a road that blows no good,

  but I am here to remind you,

  as our shadows tremble on the walls,

  that love is the early bird who is better late than never.

  The Flight of the Statues

  The ancient Greeks … used to chain

  their statues to prevent them from fleeing.

  —Michael Kimmelman

  It might have been the darkening sky

  that sent them running in all directions

  that afternoon as the air turned a pale yellow,

  but were they not used to standing out

  in the squares of our city

  in every kind of imaginable weather?

  Maybe they were frightened by a headline

  on a newspaper that was blowing by

  or was it the children in their martial arts uniforms?

  Did they finally learn about the humans

  they stood for as they pointed a sword at a cloud?

  Did they know something we did not?

  Whatever the cause, no one will forget

  the sight of all the white marble figures

  leaping from their pedestals and rushing away.

  In the parks, the guitarists fell silent.

  The vendor froze under his umbrella.

  A dog tried to hide in his owner’s shadow.

  Even the chess players under the trees

  looked up from their boards

  long enough to see the bronze generals

  dismount and run off, leaving their horses

  to peer down at the circling pigeons

  who were stealing a few more crumbs from the poor.

  Baby Listening

  According to the guest information directory,

  baby listening is a service offered by this seaside hotel.

  Baby-listening—not a baby who happens to be listening,

  as I thought when I first checked in.

  Leave the receiver off the hook,

  the directory advises,

  and your infant can be monitored by the staff,

  though the staff, the entry continues,

  cannot be held responsible for the well-being

  of the baby in question.

  Fair enough: someone to listen to the baby.

  But the phrase did suggest a baby who is listening,

  lying there in the room next to mine

  listening to my pen scratching against the page,

  or a more advanced baby who has crawled

  down the hallway of the hotel

  and is pressing its tiny, curious ear against my door.

  Lucky for some of us,

  poetry is a place where both are true at once,

  where meaning only one thing at a time spells malfunction.

  Poetry wants to have the baby who is listening at my door

  as well as the baby who is being listened to,

  quietly breathing into the nearby telephone.

  And it also wants the baby

  who is making sounds of distress

  into the curved receiver lying in the crib

  while the girl at reception has just stepped out

  to have a smoke with her boyfriend

  in the dark by the great wash and sway of the North Sea.

  Poetry wants that baby, too,

  even a little more than it wants the others.

  Bathtub Families

  is not just a phrase I made up

  though it would have given me pleasure

  to have written those words in a notebook

  then looked up at the sky wondering what they meant.

  No, I saw Bathtub Families in a pharmacy

  on the label of a clear plastic package

  containing one cow and four calves,

  a little family of animals meant to float in your tub.

  I hesitated to buy it because I knew

  I would then want the entire series of Bathtub Families,

  which would leave no room in the tub

  for the turtles, the pigs, the seals, the giraffes, and me.

  It’s enough just to have the words,

  which alone make me even more grateful

  that I was born in America

  and English is my mother tongue.

  I was lucky, too, that I waited

  for the pharmacist to fill my prescription,

  otherwise I might not have wandered

  down the aisle with the Bathtub Families.

  I think what I am really saying is that language

  is better than reality, so it doesn’t have

  to be bath time for you to enjoy

  all the Bathtub Families as they float in the air around your head.

  The Fish

  As soon as the elderly waiter

  placed before me the fish I had ordered,

  it began to stare up at me

  with its one flat, iridescent eye.

  I feel sorry for you, it seemed to say,

  eating alone in this awful restaurant

  bathed in such unkindly light

  and surrounded by these dreadful murals of Sicily.

  And I feel sorry for you, too—

  yanked from the sea and now lying dead

  next to some boiled potatoes in Pittsburgh—

  I said back to the fish as I raised my fork.

  And thus my dinner in an unfamiliar city

  with its rivers and lig
hted bridges

  was graced not only with chilled wine

  and lemon slices but with compassion and sorrow

  even after the waiter had removed my plate

  with the head of the fish still staring

  and the barrel vault of its delicate bones

  terribly exposed, save for a shroud of parsley.

  A Dog on His Master

  As young as I look,

  I am growing older faster than he,

  seven to one

  is the ratio they tend to say.

  Whatever the number,

  I will pass him one day

  and take the lead

  the way I do on our walks in the woods.

  And if this ever manages

  to cross his mind,

  it would be the sweetest

  shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass.

  The Great American Poem

  If this were a novel,

  it would begin with a character,

  a man alone on a southbound train

  or a young girl on a swing by a farmhouse.

  And as the pages turned, you would be told

  that it was morning or the dead of night,

  and I, the narrator, would describe

  for you the miscellaneous clouds over the farmhouse

  and what the man was wearing on the train

  right down to his red tartan scarf,

  and the hat he tossed onto the rack above his head,

  as well as the cows sliding past his window.

  Eventually—one can only read so fast—

  you would learn either that the train was bearing

  the man back to the place of his birth

  or that he was headed into the vast unknown,

  and you might just tolerate all of this

  as you waited patiently for shots to ring out

  in a ravine where the man was hiding

  or for a tall, raven-haired woman to appear in a doorway.

  But this is a poem,

  and the only characters here are you and I,

  alone in an imaginary room

  which will disappear after a few more lines,

  leaving us no time to point guns at one another

  or toss all our clothes into a roaring fireplace.

  I ask you: who needs the man on the train

  and who cares what his black valise contains?

  We have something better than all this turbulence

  lurching toward some ruinous conclusion.

  I mean the sound that we will hear

  as soon as I stop writing and put down this pen.

  I once heard someone compare it

  to the sound of crickets in a field of wheat

  or, more faintly, just the wind

  over that field stirring things that we will never see.

  Divorce

  Once, two spoons in bed,

  now tined forks

  across a granite table

  and the knives they have hired.

  This Little Piggy Went to Market

  is the usual thing to say when you begin

  pulling on the toes of a small child,

  and I have never had a problem with that.

  I could easily picture the piggy with his basket

  and his trotters kicking up the dust on an imaginary road.

  What always stopped me in my tracks was

  the middle toe—this little piggy ate roast beef.

  I mean I enjoy a roast beef sandwich

  with lettuce and tomato and a dollop of horseradish,

  but I cannot see a pig ordering that in a delicatessen.

  I am probably being too literal-minded here—

  I am even wondering why it’s called “horseradish.”

  I should just go along with the beautiful nonsense

  of the nursery, float downstream on its waters.

  After all, Little Jack Horner speaks to me deeply.

  I don’t want to be the one to ruin the children’s party

  by asking unnecessary questions about Puss in Boots

  or, again, the implications of a pig eating beef.

  By the way, I am completely down with going

  “Wee wee wee” all the way home,

  having done that many times and knowing exactly how it feels.

  Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant

  I am glad I resisted the temptation,

  if it was a temptation when I was young,

  to write a poem about an old man

  eating alone at a corner table in a Chinese restaurant.

  I would have gotten it all wrong

  thinking: the poor bastard, not a friend in the world

  and with only a book for a companion.

  He’ll probably pay the bill out of a change purse.

  So glad I waited all these decades

  to record how hot and sour the hot and sour soup is

  here at Chang’s this afternoon

  and how cold the Chinese beer in a frosted glass.

  And my book—José Saramago’s Blindness

  as it turns out—is so absorbing that I look up

  from its escalating horrors only

  when I am stunned by one of its arresting sentences.

  And I should mention the light

  which falls through the big windows this time of day

  italicizing everything it touches—

  the plates and tea pots, the immaculate tablecloths,

  as well as the soft brown hair of the waitress

  in the white blouse and short black skirt,

  the one who is smiling now as she bears a cup of rice

  and shredded beef with garlic to my favorite table in the corner.

  Oh, My God!

  Not only in church

  and nightly by their bedsides

  do young girls pray these days.

  Wherever they go,

  prayer is woven into their talk

  like a bright thread of awe.

  Even at the pedestrian mall

  outbursts of praise

  spring unbidden from their glossy lips.

  The Future

  When I finally arrive there—

  and it will take many days and nights—

  I would like to believe others will be waiting

  and might even want to know how it was.

  So I will reminisce about a particular sky

  or a woman in a white bathrobe

  or the time I visited a narrow strait

  where a famous naval battle had taken place.

  Then I will spread out on a table

  a large map of my world

  and explain to the people of the future

  in their pale garments what it was like—

  how mountains rose between the valleys

  and this was called geography,

  how boats loaded with cargo plied the rivers

  and this was known as commerce,

  how the people from this pink area

  crossed over into this light-green area

  and set fires and killed whoever they found

  and this was called history—

  and they will listen, mild-eyed and silent,

  as more of them arrive to join the circle,

  like ripples moving toward,

  not away from, a stone tossed into a pond.

  Envoy

  Go, little book,

  out of this house and into the world,

  carriage made of paper rolling toward town

  bearing a single passenger

  beyond the reach of this jittery pen

  and far from the desk and the nosy gooseneck lamp.

  It is time to decamp,

  put on a jacket and venture outside,

  time to be regarded by other eyes,

  bound to be held in foreign hands.

  So off you go, infants of the brain,

  with a wave and some bits of fatherly advice:

>   stay out as late as you like,

  don’t bother to call or write,

  and talk to as many strangers as you can.

  FROM HOROSCOPES FOR THE DEAD

  (2011)

  Grave

  What do you think of my new glasses

  I asked as I stood under a shade tree

  before the joined grave of my parents,

  and what followed was a long silence

  that descended on the rows of the dead

  and on the fields and the woods beyond,

  one of the one hundred kinds of silence

  according to the Chinese belief,

  each one distinct from the others,

  and the differences being so faint

  that only a few special monks

  were able to tell them all apart.

  They make you look very scholarly,

  I heard my mother say

  once I lay down on the ground

  and pressed an ear into the soft grass.

  Then I rolled over and pressed

  my other ear to the ground,

  the ear my father likes to speak into,

  but he would say nothing,

  and I could not find a silence

  among the 100 Chinese silences

  that would fit the one that he created

  even though I was the one