Ballistics

by Billy Collins

  with a truly great movie.

  Only a mean-spirited reviewer

  would ask on holiday from what?

  Carpe Diem

  Maybe it was the fast-moving clouds

  or the spring flowers quivering among the dead leaves,

  but I knew this was one day I was born to seize—

  not just another card in the deck of the year,

  but March 19th itself,

  looking as clear and fresh as the ten of diamonds.

  Living life to the fullest is the only way,

  I thought as I sat by a tall window

  and tapped my pencil on the dome of a glass paperweight.

  To drain the cup of life to the dregs

  was a piece of irresistible advice,

  I averred as I checked someone’s dates

  in the Dictionary of National Biography

  and later, as I scribbled a few words

  on the back of a picture postcard.

  Crashing through the iron gates of life

  is what it is all about,

  I decided as I lay down on the carpet,

  locked my hands behind my head,

  and considered how unique this day was

  and how different I was from the men

  of hari-kari for whom it is disgraceful

  to end up lying on your back.

  Better, they think, to be found facedown

  in blood-soaked shirt

  than to be discovered with lifeless eyes

  fixed on the elegant teak ceiling above you,

  and now I can almost hear the silence

  of the temple bells and the lighter silence

  of the birds hiding in the darkness of a hedge.

  Lost

  There was no art in losing that coin

  you gave me for luck, the one with the profile

  of an emperor on one side and a palm on the other.

  It rode for days in a pocket

  of my black pants, the paint-speckled ones,

  past storefronts, gas stations and playgrounds,

  and then it was gone, as lost as the lost

  theorems of Pythagoras, or the Medea by Ovid,

  which also slipped through the bars of time,

  and as ungraspable as the sin that landed him—

  forever out of favor with Augustus—

  on a cold rock on the coast of the Black Sea,

  where eventually he died, but not before

  writing a poem about the fish of those waters,

  into which, as we know, he was never transformed,

  nor into a flower, a tree, or a stream,

  nor into a star like Julius Caesar,

  not even into a small bird that could wing it back to Rome.

  Dublin

  So much to be learned out here in the drizzle

  with all the tall busses swinging themselves

  so close to me around corners and men

  in bunches smoking outside the betting parlors.

  And when the rain falls steadily enough

  to drive me into a gallery or a city castle,

  then the knowledge only comes pouring down

  whether I am in the mood for it or not.

  Today, it’s the codex of Leonardo on display

  in the dim light where you touch a screen

  to turn a page, the margins busy with pulleys

  and siphons, whirlwinds, tides, and sluices.

  And better informed I am to read on a little card

  the news that Herbert Hoover translated

  into English for the first time the works

  of Agricola, the father of modern mineralogy himself.

  Out the windows of the gallery,

  a jumble of raincoats and black umbrellas,

  and so my afternoon education continues

  with the discovery in a vitrine of Vegetarius,

  who in the 4th century came up

  with the idea of underwater warfare,

  hand-to-hand combat beneath the lily pads

  as if bloodying one another on the ground were not enough.

  And if his illustration of an armed soldier

  standing on the bottom of a lake

  and breathing through a snake-like tube

  comes at me tonight and shakes me out of sleep,

  I will not coax an oval pill from its bottle

  nor put on a robe and stand by the stove

  looking at the ads in a magazine

  while some milk is heating in a pan.

  I only need to slide into place

  the image of Leonardo at a table by a window,

  his marvelling head resting in his hands,

  as he wonders if water could exist on the moon.

  New Year’s Day

  Everyone has two birthdays

  according to the English essayist Charles Lamb,

  the day you were born and New Year’s Day—

  a droll observation to mull over

  as I wait for the tea water to boil in a kitchen

  that is being transformed by the morning light

  into one of those brilliant rooms of Matisse.

  “No one ever regarded the First of January

  with indifference,” writes Lamb,

  for unlike Groundhog Day or the feast of the Annunciation,

  this one marks nothing but the passage of time,

  I realized, as I lowered a tin diving bell

  of tea leaves into a little body of roiling water.

  I admit to regarding my own birthday

  as the joyous anniversary of my existence

  probably because I was, and remain

  to this day in late December, an only child.

  And as an only child—

  a tea-sipping, toast-nibbling only child

  in a colorful room this morning—

  I would welcome an extra birthday,

  one more opportunity to stop what we are doing

  for a moment and reflect on my being here on earth.

  And one more might be a small consolation

  to us all for having to face a death-day, too,

  an X in a square

  on some kitchen calendar of the future,

  the day when each of us is thrown off the train of time

  by a burly, heartless conductor

  as it roars through the months and years,

  party hats, candles, confetti, and horoscopes

  billowing up in the turbulent storm of its wake.

  The Day Lassie Died

  It is 5:40 in Sawyer County, Wisconsin, a Tuesday

  a few days before the birthday of Martin Luther, yes

  it is 1959 and I need to do my chores

  which include milking the ten cows—

  did I mention it was 5:40 in the morning?—

  and driving them with a stick into the pasture.

  After breakfast (I am thinking oatmeal

  with brown sugar and some raisins)

  I will drive the twelve miles into town

  and pick up a few things,

  a tin of hoof softener for the horse,

  some batteries, shells, a pair of rubber gloves,

  and something for my wife but I don’t know what.

  Maybe this cotton apron

  with little pictures of the Eiffel Tower on it,

  or she might like some hairpins, a box of tissues,

  yet I am tempted by this anthology

  of the Cavalier poets edited by Thomas Crofts

  or maybe The Pictorial History of Eton College by B.J.W. Hill,

  but after pacing up and down the aisles

  of Olsen’s Emporium, I finally settle on

  The Zen Teaching of Huang Po

  translated from the Chinese (obviously)

  by John Blofeld and published

  recently by the infamous Grove Press,

  and when I take everything up to Henry

  at the big bronze cash register,

&nbs
p; he asks have you seen today’s Sentinel

  and there’s her face, the dark eyes,

  the long near-smile, and the flowing golden coat

  and I’m leaning on the barn door back home

  while my own collie, who looks a lot like her,

  lies curled outside in a sunny patch

  and all you can hear as the morning warms up

  is the sound of the cows’ heavy breathing.

  three

  Tension

  Never use the word suddenly just to create

  tension.

  —Writing Fiction

  Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias

  outside in the garden,

  and suddenly I was in the study

  looking up the word oligarchy for the thirty-seventh time.

  When suddenly, without warning,

  you planted the last petunia in the flat,

  and I suddenly closed the dictionary

  now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.

  A moment later, we found ourselves

  standing suddenly in the kitchen

  where you suddenly opened a can of cat food

  and I just as suddenly watched you doing that.

  I observed a window of leafy activity

  and beyond that, a bird perched on the edge

  of the stone birdbath

  when suddenly you announced you were leaving

  to pick up a few things at the market

  and I stunned you by impulsively

  pointing out that we were getting low on butter

  and another case of wine would not be a bad idea.

  Who could tell what the next moment would hold?

  another drip from the faucet?

  another little spasm of the second hand?

  Would the painting of a bowl of pears continue

  to hang on the wall from that nail?

  Would the heavy anthologies remain on their shelves?

  Would the stove hold its position?

  Suddenly, it was anyone’s guess.

  The sun rose ever higher in the sky.

  The state capitals remained motionless on the wall map

  when suddenly I found myself lying on a couch

  where I closed my eyes and without any warning

  began to picture the Andes, of all places,

  and a path that led over the mountains to another country

  with strange customs and eye-catching hats,

  each one suddenly fringed with colorful little tassels.

  The Golden Years

  All I do these drawn-out days

  is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge

  where there are no pheasants to be seen

  and, last time I looked, no ridge.

  I could drive over to Quail Falls

  and spend the day there playing bridge,

  but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail

  would only remind me of Pheasant Ridge.

  I know a widow at Fox Run

  and another with a condo at Smokey Ledge.

  One of them smokes, and neither can run,

  so I’ll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.

  Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge?

  I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.

  Vermont, Early November

  It was in between seasons,

  after the thin twitter of late autumn

  but before the icy authority of winter,

  and I took in the scene from a porch,

  a tableau of silo and weathervane

  and a crowd of ferns on the edge of the woods—

  nothing worth writing about really,

  but it is too late to stop now

  that the ferns and the silo have been mentioned.

  I drank my warm coffee

  and took note of the disused tractor

  and the lopsided sign to the cheese factory.

  Not one of those mornings

  that makes you want to seize the day,

  not even enough glory in it to make you want

  to grasp every other day,

  yet after staring for a while

  at the plowed-under fields and the sky,

  I turned back to the order of the kitchen

  determined to seize firmly

  the second Wednesday of every month that lay ahead.

  The Effort

  Would anyone care to join me

  in flicking a few pebbles in the direction

  of teachers who are fond of asking the question:

  “What is the poet trying to say?”

  as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson

  had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts—

  inarticulate wretches that they were,

  biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.

  Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell

  and the rest could only try and fail,

  but we in Mrs. Parker’s third-period English class

  here at Springfield High will succeed

  with the help of these study questions

  in saying what the poor poet could not,

  and we will get all this done before

  that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.

  Tonight, however, I am the one trying

  to say what it is this absence means,

  the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.

  The image of this vase of cut flowers,

  not from our garden, is no help.

  And the same goes for the single plate,

  the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face

  against these new windows—the drizzle and the morning frost.

  So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker,

  who is tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard,

  and her students—a few with their hands up,

  others slouching with their caps on backwards—

  to figure out what it is I am trying to say

  about this place where I find myself

  and to do it before the noon bell rings

  and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.

  The Lamps Unlit

  It is difficult to write an aubade,

  a song about noon, or a few crepuscular lines

  without stopping to realize

  just where you are on the dial of a certain day,

  which is at least a beginning

  and better than the usual blind rush

  into the future, believed to reside

  over the next in an infinite series of hills.

  I’m all for noticing that the light

  in the tops of the trees

  is different now with the grass moist

  and cold, the heads of flowers yet unfolded,

  all for occupying a chair by a window

  or a wayside bench for an hour—

  time enough to look here and there

  as the caravan of time crosses the sand,

  time to think of the dead and lost friends,

  their faces hidden in the foliage,

  and to consider the ruination of love,

  a wisp of smoke rising from a chimney.

  And who cares if it takes me all day

  to write a poem about the dawn

  and I finish in the dark with the night—

  some love it best—draped across my shoulders.

  China

  I am an ant inside a blue bowl

  on the table of a cruel prince.

  Battle plans are being discussed.

  Much rice wine is poured.

  But even when he angers

  and drives a long knife into the table,

  I continue to circle the bowl,

  hand-painted with oranges and green vines.

  Looking Forward

  Whenever I stare into the future,

  the low, blue hills of the future,

  shading my eye
s with one hand,

  I no longer see a city of opals

  with a sunny river running through it

  or a dark city of coal and gutters.

  Nor do I see children

  donning their apocalyptic goggles

  and hiding in doorways.

  All I see is me attending your burial

  or you attending mine,

  depending on who gets to go first.

  There is a light rain.

  A figure under an umbrella

  is reading from a thick book with a black cover.

  And a passing cemetery worker

  has cut the engine to his backhoe

  and is taking a drink from a bottle of water.

  (detail)

  It was getting late in the year,