Aimless Love

by Billy Collins

  Has anyone been with me longer?

  me without siblings or children,

  you with your kindly 60 watt frosted bulb,

  you who have not died like others I knew,

  you nestled in a bath towel

  on the floorboards of the car

  as I backed it down the driveway of my marriage

  and steered east then south down the two-then four-lane roads.

  So may nights like this one,

  me sleepless, you gazing down on the page

  and now on a crystal rock, a tiny figure of a pig,

  and an orchid dying in its blue China pot.

  But that is more than enough

  of the sad drapery of the past as I hold the present

  between two fingers and the thumb

  and a blue train whistles in the distance.

  It’s time to saddle up, partner,

  once I unplug your tail from the socket,

  time to ride out west,

  far from the gaucheries of men,

  the inconstancy of women,

  and the rowdy mortality of them all,

  until we find a grove of trees near a river—

  just you and me with our bedrolls under a scattering of stars.

  Irish Poetry

  That morning under a pale hood of sky

  I heard the unambiguous scrape of spackling

  against the side of our wickered, penitential house.

  The day mirled and clabbered

  in the thick, stony light,

  and the rooks’ feathered narling

  astounded the salt waves, the plush arm of coast.

  I carried my bucket past the forked

  coercion of a tree, up toward

  the pious and nictitating preeminence of a school,

  hunkered there in its gully of learning.

  But only later, as I stood before a wash-stand

  and gaunt, phosphorescent heifers

  swam purposefully beyond these windows

  did the whorled and sparky gib of the indefinite

  manage to whorl me into knowledge.

  Then, I heard the ghost-clink of milk bottle

  on the rough threshold

  and understood the meadow-bells

  that trembled over a nimbus of ragwort—

  the whole afternoon lambent, corrugated, puddle-mad.

  After the Funeral

  When you told me you needed a drink-drink

  and not just a drink like a drink of water,

  I steered you by the elbow into a corner bar,

  which turned out to be a real bar-bar,

  dim and nearly empty with little tables in the back

  where we drank and agreed that the funeral

  was a real funeral-funeral complete with a Mass,

  incense, and tons of eulogies.

  You know, I always considered Tom a real

  friend-friend, you said, lifting your drink-drink

  to your lips, and I agreed that Tom

  was much more than just an ordinary friend.

  We also concurred that Angela’s black dress

  was elegant but not like elegant-elegant,

  just elegant enough. And a few hours later

  when the bartender brought yet another round

  of whiskeys to our table in the corner

  we recognized by his apron and his mighty girth

  that he was more than just a bartender.

  A true bartender-bartender was what he was

  we decided, with a respectful clink-clink

  of our drink-drinks, amber in a chink of afternoon light.

  Best Fall

  was what we called a game we played

  which had nothing to do

  with a favorite autumn,

  somebody else’s gorgeous reds and yellows.

  no, eleven years old

  all we wanted was to be shot

  as we charged sacrificially into the fire

  of the shooter lying prone behind a hedge

  or even better, to be that shooter

  and pick off the others

  as they charged the gun

  each one stopping in his young tracks

  to writhe and twist

  aping the contortions of death

  from the movies,

  clutching our bleeding hearts

  holding ourselves

  as we lifted—a moment of ballet—

  into the air then tumbled

  into the grass behind our houses.

  and whoever invented that game

  made sure it would have

  no ending,

  for the one who was awarded

  best fall by the shooter

  got to be the next shooter

  and so it went, shooting and being shot,

  tearing at our cowboy shirts

  trying our best

  to make death look good

  until it got almost dark

  and our mothers called us in.

  France

  You and your frozen banana,

  you and your crème brûlée.

  Can’t we just skip dessert

  and go back to the Hotel d’Orsay?

  You and your apple tart

  and your plates of profiteroles.

  Can’t we just ask for the check?

  Can’t you hear Time’s mortal call?

  Why linger here at the table

  stuffing ourselves with sweets

  when all the true pleasures await us

  in room trois cent quarante-huit?

  All Eyes

  Just because I’m dead now doesn’t mean

  I don’t exist anymore.

  All those eulogies and the obituary

  in the corner of the newspaper

  have made me feel more vibrant than ever.

  I’m here in some fashion,

  maybe like a gust of wind

  that disturbs the upper leaves,

  or blows a hat around a corner,

  or disperses a little cloud of mayflies over a stream.

  What I like best about this

  is you realizing you can no longer

  get away with things the way you used to

  when it would be ten o’clock at night

  and I wouldn’t know where you were.

  I’m all ears, you liked to say

  whenever you couldn’t bother listening.

  And now you know that I’m all eyes,

  looking in every direction,

  and a special eye is always trained on you.

  Rome in June

  There was a lot to notice that morning

  in the Church of Saint Dorothy, virgin martyr—

  a statue of Mary with a halo of electric lights,

  a faded painting of a saint in flight,

  Joseph of Copertino, as it turned out,

  and an illustration above a side altar

  bearing the title “The Musical Ecstasy of St. Francis.”

  But what struck me in a special way

  like a pebble striking the forehead

  was the realization that the simple design

  running up the interior of the church’s dome

  was identical to the design on the ceiling

  of the room by the Spanish Steps

  where Keats had died and where I

  had stood with lifted eyes just the day before.

  It was nothing more than a row

  of squares, each with the carved head

  of a white flower on a background of blue,

  but all during the priest’s sermon

  (which was either about the Wedding at Cana

  or the miracle of the loaves and fishes

  as far as my Italian could tell)

  I was staring at the same image

  that the author of Hyperion had stared at

  from his death bed as he was being devoured by tuberculosis.

  It was worth coming to Rome

 
; if only to see what supine Keats was beholding

  just before there would be no more Keats,

  only Shelley, not yet swallowed by a wave,

  and Byron before his Greek fever,

  and Wordsworth who outlived Romanticism itself.

  And it pays to lift the eyes, I thought outside the church

  where a man on a bench was reading a newspaper,

  a woman was scolding her child,

  and the heavy sky, visible above the narrow streets

  of Trastevere, was in the process

  of breaking up, showing segments of blue

  and the occasional flash of Roman sunlight.

  The Deep

  Here on this map of the oceans everything is reversed—

  the land all black except for the names of the continents

  whereas the watery parts, colored blue,

  have topographical features and even place names

  like the Bermuda Rise, which sounds harmless enough

  as does the Cocos Ridge, but how about exploring

  The Guafo Fracture Zone when you’re all alone?

  And from the many plateaus and seamounts—

  the Falkland, the Manning, the Azores—

  all you could see is water and if you’re lucky

  a big fish swallowing a school of smaller ones

  through the bars of your deep-sea diver’s helmet.

  And talk about depth: at 4,000 feet below the surface,

  where you love to float on your back all summer,

  we enter the Midnight Zone where the monkfish

  quietly says his prayers in order to attract fresh prey,

  and drop another couple of miles and you

  have reached The Abyss where the sea cucumber

  is said to undulate minding its own business

  unless it’s deceiving an attacker with its luminescence

  before disappearing into the blackness.

  What attacker, I can hear you asking,

  could be down there messing with the sea cucumber?

  and that is exactly why I crumpled the map into a ball

  and stuffed it in a metal wastebasket

  before heading out for a long walk along a sunny trail

  in the thin, high-desert air, accompanied

  by juniper trees, wildflowers, and that gorgeous hawk.

  Biographical Notes in an Anthology of Haiku

  Walking the dog,

  you meet

  lots of dogs.

  —Soshi

  One was a seventeenth-century doctor

  arrested for trading with Dutch merchants.

  One loved sake then disappeared

  through the doors of a monastery in his final years.

  Another was a freight agent

  who became a nun after her husband died.

  Quite a few lived the samurai life

  excelling in the lance, sword, and horseback riding

  as well as poetry, painting, and calligraphy.

  This one started writing poems at eight,

  and that one was a rice merchant of some repute.

  One was a farmer, another ran a pharmacy.

  But next to the name of my favorite, Soshi,

  there is no information at all,

  not even a guess at his years and a question mark,

  which left me looking vacantly at the wall

  after I had read his perfect little poem.

  Whether you poke your nose into Plato

  or get serious with St. John of the Cross,

  you will not find a more unassailable truth

  than walking the dog, you meet lots of dogs

  or a sweeter one, I would add.

  If I were a teacher with a student

  who deserved punishment, I would make him write

  Walking the dog, you meet lots of dogs

  on the blackboard a hundred thousand times

  or until the boy discovered

  that this was no punishment at all, but a treat.

  And if I were that student

  holding a broken piece of chalk

  ready to begin filling the panels of the board,

  I would first stand by one of the tall windows

  to watch the other students running in the yard

  shouting each other’s names,

  the large autumn trees sheltering their play,

  everything so obvious now, thanks to the genius of Sōshi.

  Florida in December

  From this dock by a lake

  where I walked down after a late dinner—

  some clouds blown like gauze across the stars,

  and every so often an airplane

  crossing the view from left to right,

  its green starboard wing light

  descending against this soft wind into the city airport.

  The permanent stars,

  I think on the walk back to the house,

  and the momentary clouds in their vaporous shapes,

  I go on, my hands clasped behind my back

  like a professor of nothing in particular.

  Then I am near enough to the house—

  warm, amber windows,

  cold dots of lights from the Christmas tree,

  glad to have seen those clouds, now blown away,

  happy to be under the stars,

  constant and swirling in the firmament,

  and here on the threshold of this house

  with all its work and hope,

  and steady enough under a fixed and shifting sky.

  Dining Alone

  He who eats alone chokes alone.

  —Arab saying

  I would rather eat at the bar,

  but such behavior is regarded

  by professionals as a form of denial,

  so here I am seated alone

  at a table with a white tablecloth

  attended by an elderly waiter with no name—

  ideal conditions for dining alone

  according to the connoisseurs of this minor talent.

  I have brought neither book nor newspaper

  since reading material is considered cheating.

  Eating alone, they say, means eating alone,

  not in the company of Montaigne

  or the ever-engaging Nancy Mitford.

  Nor do I keep glancing up as if waiting

  for someone who inevitably fails to appear—

  a sign of moral weakness

  to those who take this practice seriously.

  And the rewards?

  I am thinking of an obvious one right now

  as I take the time to contemplate

  on my lifted fork a piece of trout with almond slices.

  And I can enjoy swirling the wine in my glass

  until it resembles a whirlpool

  in a 19th-century painting of a ship foundering in a storm.

  Then there are the looks of envy

  from that fellow on the blind date

  and the long-married couple facing each other in silence.

  I pierced a buttered spear of asparagus

  and wondered if the moon would be visible tonight,

  but uncapping my pen was out of the question

  for writing, too, is frowned upon

  by the true champions of solitude.

  All that would have to wait

  until after I have walked home,

  collar up, under the streetlights.

  Not until I would hear the echo of the front door

  closing behind me could I record

  in a marbled notebook—

  like the ones I had as a schoolboy—

  my observations about the art

  of dining alone in the company of strangers.

  Lucky Bastards

  From the deck of the swimming pool

  you could see the planes taking off from LAX

  and whenever my father visited his friend there,

  the two of them would sit
in the sun with their drinks

  and kill the time between golf and dinner

  by betting on whether the next plane would bank

  left or right, and if you picked the long shot—

  one continuing straight over the ocean—you got double.

  The time I was there with them, I watched

  the singles and fives changing hands

  as they laughed “You lucky bastard!”

  and I learned again the linkage between friendship and money

  and the sweet primacy of one over the other,

  which is not to say that Sandburg’s six-volume

  biography of Lincoln or the writings of Lao Tzu

  are not also excellent teachers, each in its own way.

  “I Love You”

  Early on, I noticed that you always say it

  to each of your children

  as you are getting off the phone with them

  just as you never fail to say it

  to me whenever we arrive at the end of a call.

  It’s all new to this only child.

  I never heard my parents say it,

  at least not on such a regular basis,

  nor did it ever occur to me to miss it.

  To say I love you pretty much every day

  would have seemed strangely obvious,

  like saying I’m looking at you

  when you are standing there looking at someone.

  If my parents had started saying it

  a lot, I would have started to worry about them.