No moment was given there
spacious enough
to brake or swerve within,
only time enough to keep my line,
hoping without hope,
knowing, as I needled through the instant,
that the two of us had always been meant to meet here,
my curved line crossing his
as on some unknowable graph
spread out on a vast table
under the glare of a hanging lamp—
a relentless diagram,
millions of faint red lines
forming millions of tiny squares.
Reincarnation and You
To come back at all would be outlandish enough,
let alone to return as something else,
yet most are quick with a preference
for animals, usually, birds
fluttering at the top of the list
pursued by jaguars and cheetahs,
sometimes a peacock
but never an ant, never a snail,
despite the quiet modesty of their lives.
Once around is enough for me
though whenever you ask
I come up with something, a waterfall
or the ferns quivering in its spray.
An enormous piano, I will say one day,
and the next a puddle in a sunny
tropical village after a week of rain.
Or I will pick a lime for the fun of it
and hang there all day in the Florida sun
trying to make death appear as easy
as you make it sound
when you stand by the pearl gray windows
and explain your life as the lapdog of a duchess.
But never mind all that,
never mind the elephant-headed god
and the transmigration of souls.
Forget the rings of time
and the abandonment of desire.
Come closer. Look me in the eye.
Tell me what kind
of animal you want to be today,
and I will whisper in your ear
what I really want to be, come to think of it,
now that all the sun has drained
out of this room and neither one of us
has thought to put on a lamp—
a zoo in a lost city,
one that can be entered or left
only by crossing a range of mountains
covered with deep snow, all year round.
Jazz and Nature
It was another clear sunny morning,
a dry breeze agitating the trees around the house,
and I had nothing on tap—
my usual scene in late August.
I was reading the autobiography
of Art Pepper, so I put on an Art Pepper album
and switched on the outdoor speakers
so I could sit outside in the hot sun,
and read more about his life of junk and prison
while I listened to his speedy, mellow alto
pouring out of two big maples
as if West Coast jazz were the music of Nature itself.
In this way, I drew a kind of box
around the morning,
in three dimensions and in pencil
with me inside it holding a ruler in my hand.
I read and listened and read
and sometimes flipped to the photographs
to check the face of the man
who told me he once drove a greenish gold Cadillac
that you could see forever into, like looking into a lake;
the man who said he composed
a ballad called “Diane” for his second wife
only to realize later
that the tune was way too beautiful for her.
The fellow who admitted to selling
his dog, a champagne poodle named Bijou,
for a twenty-dollar score
and who mentioned that men in prison
who were trying to kick would tuck
their pant legs into their socks
so the slightest breeze would not touch their skin.
Behind where I was sitting in the sun
was an outbreak of wild pink phlox,
and some of the bees nuzzling there
started to hum around my head.
One bee in particular seemed so curious
about me I took a swipe at him,
stood up suddenly and said “Don't mess with me
and I won't mess with you, you little punk,”
a remark no doubt inspired
by my reading about California lowlife
in nineteen fifty-seven,
my all-time favorite year for jazz, as it happens.
But he persisted, this bee, and finally
drove me inside to the cool, dark study
where a cat was sleeping on a chair,
a good place to write this down
and wonder what the rest of the day would hold—
maybe hanging a print on the wall
or getting a surprise phone call
from someone I used to love.
How about some Dexter Gordon
around the cocktail hour,
and who knows?
perhaps an encounter with a vicious ant—
all likely parts of my own autobiography,
a more cautious tale, told in the present tense,
with a few crude illustrations
and a diagram of a small family tree,
the work whose pages are turned
every day like a wheel that is turned by water,
the thing I can never stop writing,
the only book I can never put down.
And His Sextet
Now that all the twilight has seeped
out of the room
and I am alone here listening,
the bass is beginning to sound
like my father
ascending the flights of stairs
every weekday evening,
always the same cadence,
a beat you could build a city on.
And the alto is the woman
I sat next to on a train
who wore a tiny silver watch around her wrist.
The drums are drops of water
on my forehead,
one for every inhabitant of China.
And the tenor, let us say,
is someone's younger brother
who moved out West and never writes,
or the tenor is a pair of aces
lost in the desert,
a black valentine,
or a swan passing under a willow.
But the piano—
the piano is the piano
you gave me one Christmas,
a big black curve
standing at the end of the room
with a red bow tied around its leg
and snow falling on the house
and the row of hemlocks.
And though by now I know some chords
and a few standards,
I still love lying on the floor
like this, eyes closed,
hands behind my head,
pouring forth the solo on “Out of the Blue”
in the Fantasy Studios,
Berkeley, California,
on October 4th, 1951.
Where I Live
The house sits at one end of a two-acre trapezoid.
There is a wide lawn, a long brick path,
rhododendrons, and large, heavy maples.
Behind the geometry of the nine rooms,
the woods run up a hillside;
and across the road in front
is a stream called the Plum Brook.
It must have flowed through an orchard
that no longer exists.
Tomorrow early, I will drive down
and talk to the stonecutter,
but today I am staying home,
standing at one window, then another,
or putting on a jacket
and wandering around outside
or sitting in a chair
watching the trees full of light-green buds
under the low hood of the sky.
This is the first good rain to fall
since my father was buried last week,
and even though he was very old,
I am amazed at how the small drops
stream down the panes of glass,
as usual,
gathering,
as they always have,
in pools on the ground.
My Life
Sometimes I see it as a straight line
drawn with a pencil and a ruler
transecting the circle of the world
or as a finger piercing
a smoke ring, casual, inquisitive,
but then the sun will come out
or the phone will ring
and I will cease to wonder
if it is one thing,
a large ball of air and memory,
or many things,
a string of small farming towns,
a dark road winding through them.
Let us say it is a field
I have been hoeing every day,
hoeing and singing,
then going to sleep in one of its furrows,
or now that it is more than half over,
a partially open door,
rain dripping from the eaves.
Like yours, it could be anything,
a nest with one egg,
a hallway that leads to a thousand rooms—
whatever happens to float into view
when I close my eyes
or look out a window
for more than a few minutes,
so that some days I think
it must be everything and nothing at once.
But this morning, sitting up in bed,
wearing my black sweater and my glasses,
the curtains drawn and the windows up,
I am a lake, my poem is an empty boat,
and my life is the breeze that blows
through the whole scene
stirring everything it touches—
the surface of the water, the limp sail,
even the heavy, leafy trees along the shore.
Aristotle
This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.
Think of an egg, the letter A,
a woman ironing on a bare stage
as the heavy curtain rises.
This is the very beginning.
The first-person narrator introduces himself,
tells us about his lineage.
The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.
Here the climbers are studying a map
or pulling on their long woolen socks.
This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.
The profile of an animal is being smeared
on the wall of a cave,
and you have not yet learned to crawl.
This is the opening, the gambit,
a pawn moving forward an inch.
This is your first night with her,
your first night without her.
This is the first part
where the wheels begin to turn,
where the elevator begins its ascent,
before the doors lurch apart.
This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes—
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward's child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle—
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall—
too much to name, too much to think about.
And this is the end,
the car running out of road,
the river losing its name in an ocean,
the long nose of the photographed horse
touching the white electronic line.
This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,
the empty wheelchair,
and pigeons floating down in the evening.
Here the stage is littered with bodies,
the narrator leads the characters to their cells,
and the climbers are in their graves.
It is me hitting the period
and you closing the book.
It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen
and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.
This is the final bit
thinning away to nothing.
This is the end, according to Aristotle,
what we have all been waiting for,
what everything comes down to,
the destination we cannot help imagining,
a streak of light in the sky,
a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgments are due to the editors of the following publications where many of these poems first appeared: The American Poetry Review (“Shoveling Snow with Buddha”); The American Scholar (“Duck/Rabbit,” “Paradelle for Susan”); The Berkeley Poetry Review (“Afternoon with Irish Cows”); Black Warrior Review (“I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of ‘Three Blind Mice’”); Brilliant Corners (“And His Sextet,” “Snow”); Crab Orchard Review (“Journal”); DoubleTake (“Jazz and Nature”); Field (“Some Days,” “Silence”); Five Points (“Fishing on the Susquehanna in July”); The Georgia Review (“Japan,” “Bonsai”); The Kenyon Review (“The Night House”); The New England Review (“Reincarnation and You”); The Paris Review (“Aristotle,” “Picnic, Lightning,” “Musée des Beaux Arts Revisited”); Plum Review (“After the Storm,” “The Death of the Hat,” “The List of Ancient Pastimes,” “Moon,” “This Much I Do Remember”); Poetry (“I Go Back to the House for a Book,” “In the Room of a Thousand Miles,” “Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey,” “Lines Lost Among Trees,” “Marginalia,” “Morning,” “My Life,” “Serpentine,” “Splitting Wood,” “What I Learned Today”); Poetry East (“Looking West”); Poetry International (“Home Again”); Western Humanities Review (“Victoria's Secret”); Wordsmith (“Where I Live”).
“Lines Lost Among Trees” appeared in The Best American Poetry 1997, edited by James Tate.
“Japan” appeared in The 1997 Pushcart Prize XXI.
A grant from the Research Foundation of The City University of New York facilitated the preparation of this book.
About the Author
Billy Collins is professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, American Scholar, Harper's, and many other magazines. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowmen
t for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Questions About Angels was a winner of the National Poetry Series publication prize. Picnic, Lightning is his sixth collection of poetry. He lives in Somers, New York.
Picnic, Lightning Page 5