Aimless Love

by Billy Collins

  and another looked like a goose

  some days and on other days a white flower.

  Many of them appeared only in dreams

  or while I was writing a poem

  with freezing fingers in the house of a miser.

  Others were more like me,

  looking out the window in a worn shirt

  then later staring into the dark.

  None of them ever made the lacrosse team,

  but they all made me as proud

  as I was on the day they failed to be born.

  There is no telling—

  maybe tonight or later in the week

  another one of my children will not be born.

  I see this next one as a baby

  lying naked below a ceiling pasted with stars

  but only for a little while,

  then I see him as a monk in a gray robe

  walking back and forth

  in the gravel yard of an imaginary monastery,

  his head bowed, wondering where I am.

  Hangover

  If I were crowned emperor this morning,

  every child who is playing Marco Polo

  in the swimming pool of this motel,

  shouting the name Marco Polo back and forth

  Marco Polo Marco Polo

  would be required to read a biography

  of Marco Polo—a long one with fine print—

  as well as a history of China and of Venice,

  the birthplace of the venerated explorer

  Marco Polo Marco Polo

  after which each child would be quizzed

  by me then executed by drowning

  regardless how much they managed

  to retain about the glorious life and times of

  Marco Polo Marco Polo

  Table Talk

  Not long after we had sat down to dinner

  at a long table in a restaurant in Chicago

  and were deeply engrossed in the heavy menus,

  one of us—a bearded man with a colorful tie—

  asked if anyone had ever considered

  applying the paradoxes of Zeno to the martyrdom of St. Sebastian.

  The differences between these two figures

  were much more striking than the differences

  between the Cornish hen and the trout amandine

  I was wavering between, so I looked up and closed my menu.

  If, the man with the tie continued,

  an object moving through space

  will never reach its destination because it is always

  limited to cutting the distance to its goal in half,

  then it turns out that St. Sebastian did not die

  from the wounds inflicted by the arrows:

  the cause of death was fright at the spectacle of their approach.

  Saint Sebastian, according to Zeno, would have died of a heart attack.

  I think I’ll have the trout, I told the waiter

  for it was now my turn to order,

  but all through the elegant dinner

  I kept thinking of the arrows forever nearing

  the pale, quivering flesh of St. Sebastian

  a fleet of them forever halving the tiny distances

  to his body, tied to post with rope,

  even after the archers had packed it in and gone home.

  And I thought of the bullet never reaching

  the wife of William Burroughs, an apple trembling on her head,

  the tossed acid never getting to the face of that girl,

  and the Oldsmobile never knocking my dog into a ditch.

  The theories of Zeno floated above the table

  like thought balloons from the 5th century before Christ,

  yet my fork continued to arrive at my mouth

  delivering morsels of asparagus and crusted fish,

  and after we ate and lifted our glasses,

  we left the restaurant and said goodbye on the street

  then walked our separate ways in the world where things do arrive,

  where people usually get where they are going—

  where trains pull into the station in a cloud of vapor,

  where geese land with a splash on the surface of a pond,

  and the one you love crosses the room and arrives in your arms—

  and, yes, where sharp arrows can pierce a torso,

  splattering blood on the groin and the feet of the saint,

  that popular subject of European religious painting.

  One hagiographer compared him to a hedgehog bristling with quills.

  Delivery

  Moon in the upper window,

  shadow of my crooked pen on the page,

  and I find myself wishing that the news of my death

  might be delivered not by a dark truck

  but by a child’s attempt to draw that truck—

  the long rectangular box of the trailer,

  some lettering on the side,

  then the protruding cab, the ovoid wheels,

  maybe the inscrutable profile of a driver,

  and puffs of white smoke

  issuing from the tailpipe, drawn like flowers

  and similar in their expression to the clouds in the sky, only smaller.

  What She Said

  When he told me he expected me to pay for dinner,

  I was like give me a break.

  I was not the exact equivalent of give me a break.

  I was just similar to give me a break.

  As I said, I was like give me a break.

  I would love to tell you

  how I was able to resemble give me a break

  without actually being identical to give me a break,

  but all I can say is that I sensed

  a similarity between me and give me a break.

  And that was close enough

  at that point in the evening

  even if it meant I would fall short

  of standing up from the table and screaming

  Give me a break,

  for God’s sake will you please give me a break?!

  No, for that moment

  with the rain streaking the restaurant windows

  and the waiter approaching,

  I felt the most I could be was like

  to a certain degree

  give me a break.

  Drawing You from Memory

  I seem to have forgotten several features

  crucial to the doing of this,

  for instance, how your lower lip

  meets your upper lip besides just being below it,

  and what happens at the end of the nose,

  how much does it shade the plane of your cheek,

  and would even a bit of nostril be visible from this angle?

  Chinese eyes, you call them

  which could be the difficulty I have

  in showing the flash of light in your iris,

  and being so far away from you for so long,

  I cannot remember what direction

  it flows, the deep river of your hair.

  But all of this will come together

  the minute I see you again at the station,

  my notebook and pens packed away,

  your face smiling as I cup it in my hands,

  or frowning later when we are home

  and you are berating me in the kitchen

  waving the pages in my face

  demanding to know the name of this latest little whore.

  Cemetery Ride

  My new copper-colored bicycle

  is looking pretty fine under a blue sky

  as I pedal along one of the sandy paths

  in the Palm Cemetery here in Florida,

  wheeling past the headstones of the Lyons,

  the Campbells, the Dunlaps, and the Davenports,

  Arthur and Ethel, who outlived him by 11 years

  I slow down even more to notice,

  but not so much as to fall sideways on the gro
und.

  And here’s a guy named Happy Grant

  next to his wife Jean in their endless bed.

  Annie Sue Simms is right there and sounds

  a lot more fun than Theodosia S. Hawley.

  And good afternoon, Emily Polasek

  and to you too, George and Jane Cooper,

  facing each other in profile, two sides of a coin.

  I wish I could take you all for a ride

  in my wire basket on this glorious April day,

  not a thing as simple as your name, Bill Smith,

  even trickier then Clarence Augustus Coddington.

  Then how about just you, Enid Parker?

  Would you like to gather up your voluminous skirts

  and ride side-saddle on the crossbar

  and tell me what happened between 1863 and 1931?

  I’ll even let you ring the silver bell.

  But if you’re not ready, I can always ask

  Mary Brennan to rise from her long sleep

  beneath the swaying grey beards of Spanish moss

  and ride with me along these halls of the dead

  so I can listen to her strange laughter

  as some crows flap overhead in the blue

  and the spokes of my wheels catch the dazzling sun.

  Lakeside

  As optical illusions go

  it was one of the more spectacular,

  a cluster of bright stars

  appearing to move across the night sky

  as if on a secret mission

  while, of course, it was the low clouds

  that were doing the moving,

  scattered over my head by a wind from the east.

  And as hard as I looked

  I could not get the stars to budge again.

  It was like the curious figure

  of the duck/rabbit—

  why, even paradoxical Wittgenstein

  could not find his way back to the rabbit

  once he had beheld the bill of the duck.

  But which was which?

  Were the stars the rabbit

  and the blown clouds the duck?

  or the other way around?

  You’re being ridiculous,

  I said to myself,

  on the walk back to the house,

  but then the correct answer struck me

  not like a bolt of lightning,

  but more like a heavy bolt of cloth.

  My Hero

  Just as the hare is zipping across the finish line,

  the tortoise has stopped once again

  by the roadside,

  this time to stick out his neck

  and nibble a bit of sweet grass,

  unlike the previous time

  when he was distracted

  by a bee humming in the heart of a wildflower.

  Poetry Workshop Held in a Former Cigar Factory in Key West

  After our final class, when we disbanded

  as the cigar rollers here had disbanded decades ago,

  getting up from their benches for the last time

  as the man who read to them during their shift

  closed his book without marking the page where he left off,

  I complimented myself on my restraint.

  For never in that sunny white building

  did I draw an analogy between cigar-making and poetry.

  Not even after I had studied the display case

  containing the bladed chaveta, the ring gauge,

  and the hand guillotine with its measuring rule

  did I suggest that the cigar might be a model for the poem.

  Nor did I ever cite the exemplary industry

  of those anonymous rollers and cutters—

  the best producing 300 cigars in a day

  compared to 3 flawless poems in a lifetime if you’re lucky—

  who worked the broad leaves of tobacco

  into cylinders ready to be held lightly in the hand.

  Not once did I imply that tightly rolling an intuition

  into a perfectly shaped, hand-made thing

  might encourage a reader to remove the brightly colored

  encircling band and slip it over her finger

  and take the poet as her spouse in a sudden puff of smoke.

  No, I kept all of that to myself, until now.

  Returning the Pencil to Its Tray

  Everything is fine—

  the first bits of sun are on

  the yellow flowers behind the low wall,

  people in cars are on their way to work,

  and I will never have to write again.

  Just looking around

  will suffice from here on in.

  Who said I had to always play

  the secretary of the interior?

  And I am getting good at being blank,

  staring at all the zeroes in the air.

  It must have been all the time spent

  in the kayak this summer

  that brought this out,

  the yellow one which went

  nicely with the pale blue life jacket—

  the sudden, tippy

  buoyancy of the launch,

  then the exertion, striking

  into the wind against the short waves,

  but the best was drifting back,

  the paddle resting athwart the craft,

  and me mindless in the middle of time.

  Not even that dark cormorant

  perched on the No Wake sign,

  his narrow head raised

  as if he were looking over something,

  not even that inquisitive little fellow

  could bring me to write another word.

  NEW POEMS

  The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska

  Too bad you weren’t here six months ago,

  was a lament I heard on my visit to Nebraska.

  You could have seen the astonishing spectacle

  of the sandhill cranes, thousands of them

  feeding and even dancing on the shores of the Platte River.

  There was no point in pointing out

  the impossibility of my being there then

  because I happened to be somewhere else,

  so I nodded and put on a look of mild disappointment

  if only to be part of the commiseration.

  It was the same look I remember wearing

  about six months ago in Georgia

  when I was told that I had just missed

  the spectacular annual outburst of azaleas,

  brilliant against the green backdrop of spring

  and the same in Vermont six months before that

  when I arrived shortly after

  the magnificent foliage had gloriously peaked,

  Mother Nature, as she is called,

  having touched the hills with her many-colored brush,

  a phenomenon that occurs, like the others,

  around the same time every year when I am apparently off

  in another state, stuck in a motel lobby

  with the local paper and a styrofoam cup of coffee,

  busily missing God knows what.

  Foundling

  How unusual to be living a life of continual self-expression,

  jotting down little things,

  noticing a leaf being carried down a stream,

  then wondering what will become of me,

  and finally to work alone under a lamp

  as if everything depended on this,

  groping blindly down a page,

  like someone lost in a forest.

  And to think it all began one night

  on the steps of a nunnery

  where I lay gazing up from a sewing basket,

  which was doubling for a proper baby carrier,

  staring into the turbulent winter sky,

  too young to wonder about anything

  including my recent abandonment—

  but it was there that I committed

  my fi
rst act of self-expression,

  sticking out my infant tongue

  and receiving in return (I can see it now)

  a large, pristine snowflake much like any other.

  Catholicism

  There’s a possum who appears here at odd times,

  often walking up the path to the house

  in the middle of the day like a little ghost

  with a long tail and a blank expression on his face.

  He likes to slip behind the woodpile,

  but sometimes he gets so close to the window

  where I am standing with a glass in my hand

  that I start to review my sins, systematically

  going from one commandment to the next.

  What is it about him that causes me

  to begin an examination of conscience,

  calling to mind my failings in this time of reflection?

  It could just be the twitching of the tail

  and that white face, but his slow priestly pace

  also makes a contribution, as do the tiny paws,

  more like hands, really, with opposable thumbs

  able to carry a nut or dig a hole in the earth

  or lift a chalice above his head

  or even deliver a document,

  I am thinking as he nears the back door,

  not merely a subpoena but an order

  of excommunication with my name and a date