Ballistics

by Billy Collins

  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 a large 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 the gate, but no boy or girl

  had ever 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.

  Le Chien

  I remember late one night in Paris

  speaking at length to a dog in English

  about the future of American culture.

  No wonder she kept cocking her head

  as I went on about “summer movies”

  and the intolerable poetry of my compatriots.

  I was standing and she was sitting

  on a dim street in front of a butcher shop,

  and come to think of it, she could have been waiting

  for the early morning return of the lambs

  and the bleeding sides of beef

  to their hooks in the window.

  For my part, I had mixed my drinks,

  trading in the tulip of wine

  for the sharp nettles of whiskey.

  Why else would I be wasting my time

  and hers trying to explain “corn dog,”

  “white walls,” and “the March of Dimes”?

  She showed such patience for a dog

  without breeding while I went on—

  in a whisper now after shouts from a window—

  about “helmet laws” and “tag sale”

  wishing I only had my camera

  so I could carry a picture of her home with me.

  On the loopy way back to my hotel—

  after some long and formal goodbyes—

  I kept thinking how I would have loved

  to hang her picture over the mantel

  where my maternal grandmother

  now looks down from her height as always,

  silently complaining about the choice of the frame.

  Then, before dinner each evening

  I could stand before the image of that very dog,

  a glass of wine in hand,

  submitting all of my troubles and petitions

  to the court of her dark-brown, adoring eyes.

  Addendum

  What I forgot to tell you in that last poem

  if you were paying attention at all

  was that I really did love her at the time.

  The maritime light in the final lines

  might have seemed contrived,

  as false as any puffed up Italian sonnet,

  and the same could be said

  for the high cliffside flowers

  I claimed to have introduced to her hair

  and sure, the many imaginary moons

  I said were circling our bed as we slept,

  the cosmos enclosed by the walls of the room.

  But the truth is we loved

  to take long walks on the windy shore,

  not the shore between the sea of her

  and the symbolic land of me,

  but the real shore of empty shells,

  the sun rising, the water running up and back.

  On the Death of a Next-Door Neighbor

  So much younger and with a tall, young son

  in the house above ours on a hill,

  it seemed that death had blundered once again.

  Was it poor directions, the blurring rain,

  or the too-small numerals on the mailbox

  that sent his dark car up the wrong winding driveway?

  Surely, it was me he was looking for—

  overripe, childless, gaudy with appetite,

  the one who should be ghosting over the rooftops

  not standing barefooted in this kitchen

  on a sun-shot October morning

  after eight days and nights of downpour,

  me with my presumptuous breathing,

  my arrogant need for coffee,

  my love of the colorful leaves beyond the windows.

  The weight of my clothes, not his,

  might be hanging in the darkness of a closet today,

  my rake idle, my pen across a notebook.

  The harmony of this house, not his,

  might be missing a voice,

  the hallways jumpy with the cry of the telephone—

  if only death had consulted his cracked leather map,

  then bent to wipe the fog

  from the windshield with an empty sleeve.

  Separation

  With only a two-and-a-half-inch wooden goose

  to keep me company at this desk,

  I am beginning a new life of discipline.

  No more wandering out in thunderstorms

  hoping to be hit by a bolt of lightning

  from the raised hand of Randall Jarrell.

  No more standing at an open window

  with my lyre strings finely tuned

  waiting for a stray zephyr to blow my way.

  Instead I will report here every morning

  and bend over my work like St. Jerome

  with his cowl, quill, and a skull for a paperweight.

  And the small white goose with his yellow

  feet and beak and a black dot for an eye

  is more than enough companionship for me.

  He is well worth the dollar I paid for him

  in a roadside trinket shop in New Mexico

  and more familiar to me than the household deities

  of this guest cottage in the woods—

  two porcelain sphinxes on the mantel

  and a pale, blank-eyed Roman bust on a high shelf

  on this first morning without you—

  me holding a coffee I forgot to pay for

  and the gods of wind and sun contending in the crowded trees.

  four

  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.

  Passivity

  Tonight I turned off every light

  in this stone, slate-roofed cottage,

  then I walked out into the blackened woods

  and sat on a rock next to a bust

  of what looked like a sneering Roman consul,

  a mantle of concrete draped over his shoulders.

  I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon

  and the stars scattered like a handful of salt

  across the faraway sky,

  and I visited some of my new quandaries

  including where to live and what to do there,

  and leaning back to take in the sizable night,

  I arrived at the decision

  that I would never make another decision.

  Instead of darting this way or that,

  I would stand at a crossroads until my watch

  ran down and the clothes fell off me

  and were carried by a heavy rain out to sea.

  Instead of choosing one thing over another,

  I would do nothing but picture

  a little silver ball swinging back and forth from a cloud.

  I would celebrate only the two equinoxes

  and pass the rest of the time

  balancing a silver scale with silver coins.

  And I would see to it that the image of a seesaw—

  or teeter-totter as it once was called—

  was added to my family crest,

  stitched into that empty patch

  just below the broken plow

  and above the blindfolded bee.

  Ornithography

  The legendary Cang Jie was said to

  have invented writing after observing

  the tracks of birds.

  A light snow last night,

  and now the earth falls open to a fresh page.

  A high wind is breaking up the clouds.

  Children wait for the yellow bus in a huddle,

  and under the feeder, some birds

  are busy writing short stories,

  poems, and letters to their mothers.

  A crow is working on an editorial.

  That chickadee is etching a list,

  and a robin walks back and forth

  composing the opening to her autobiography.

  All so prolific this morning,

  these expressive little creatures,

  and each with an alphabet of only two letters.

  A far cry from me watching

  in silence behind a window wondering

  what just frightened them into flight—

  a dog’s bark, a hawk overhead?

  or had they simply finished

  saying whatever it was they had to say?

  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 by 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 sway and wash 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.

  Despair

  So much gloom and doubt in our poetry—

  flowers wilting on the table,

  the self regarding itself in a watery mirror.

  Dead leaves cover the ground,

  the wind moans in the chimney,

  and the tendrils of the yew tree inch toward the coffin.

  I wonder what the ancient Chinese poets

  would make of all this,

  these shadows and empty cupboards?

  Today, with the sun blazing in the trees,

  my thoughts turn to the great

  tenth-century celebrator of experience,

  W
a-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things

  could hardly be restrained,

  and to his joyous counterpart in the western provinces, Ye-Hah.

  The Idea of Natural History at Key West

  When I happened to notice myself

  walking naked past a wall-length mirror

  one spring morning

  in a house by the water

  where a friend was letting me stay,

  I looked like one of those silhouettes

  that illustrate the evolution of man,

  but not exactly the most recent figure.