The Rain in Portugal

by Billy Collins

  but I knew I did not want to vanish down that hallway

  never to see my parents again or my dog Sparky,

  and never to grow up, as it turned out,

  to study Tagore and think about the months

  bearing their old Roman names from one year into the next.

  Many Moons

  The thinnest of slivers can come

  as a surprise some nights.

  A girl leaving a restaurant

  points up to show her friends.

  And there is the full one,

  bloated with light,

  a bright circle over the city

  keeping the dreamers from sleep.

  But the moon tonight

  is crossed by a drift of clouds

  and looks like a mug shot

  of a criminal, a cornered man.

  One of its seas forms a frown

  that makes for a grudging look.

  The last thing it ever wanted

  was to end up being a moon.

  It’s the only light in the sky

  save for a solitary star,

  whose sisters and brothers

  must be blinking somewhere afar,

  leaving the moon and me

  to circle in our turning places,

  his face remote and cold,

  mine warm but vexed by his troubles.

  Note to J. Alfred Prufrock

  I just dared to eat

  a really big peach

  as ripe as it could be

  and I have on

  a pair of plaid shorts

  and a blue tee shirt with a hole in it

  and little rivers of juice

  are now running down my chin and wrist

  and dripping onto the pool deck.

  What is your problem, man?

  Speed Walking on August 31, 2013

  Nothing much to report this morning

  as if anyone were waiting to hear,

  putting the day on hold like,

  just a few women jogging by,

  girls with their eyes lowered,

  and a few men, their awkward hellos.

  The squirrels don’t really count

  because of their ubiquity,

  but there was the one brown rabbit

  frozen up ahead on the cinder path,

  immobile as a painting of a brown rabbit,

  so I stopped and tried to be

  as still as a pencil drawing of a man,

  and maybe a half a minute passed

  before he bounced himself into the weeds.

  Was that you, Seamus,

  coming to pay me a little visit?

  Who else could it possibly be?

  I asked with confidence.

  Not Robert Penn Warren surely.

  No, only you with your eye still bright.

  December 1st

  Today is my mother’s birthday,

  but she’s not here to celebrate

  by opening a flowery card

  or looking calmly out a window.

  If my mother were alive,

  she’d be 114 years old,

  and I am guessing neither of us

  would be enjoying her birthday very much.

  Mother, I would love to see you again

  to take you shopping or to sit

  in your sunny apartment with a pot of tea,

  but it wouldn’t be the same at 114.

  And I’m no prize either,

  almost 20 years older than the last time

  you saw me sitting by your deathbed.

  Some days, I look worse than yesterday’s oatmeal.

  Happy Birthday, anyway. Happy Birthday to you.

  Here I am in a wallpapered room

  raising a glass of birthday whiskey

  and picturing your face, the brooch on your collar.

  It must have been frigid that morning

  in the hour just before dawn

  on your first December 1st

  at the family farm a hundred miles north of Toronto.

  I imagine they had you wrapped up tight,

  and there was your tiny pink face

  sticking out of the bunting,

  and all those McIsaacs getting used to saying your name.

  Genuflection

  The moment I was told about the Irish habit

  of tipping the cap to the first magpie

  one encounters in the course of a day

  and saying to him “Good morning, sir,”

  I knew I would be in for the long haul.

  No one should be made to count

  the number of magpies I have treated

  with such deference, such magpie protocol,

  the latest being today when I spotted one

  perched on the railing of a fence

  along the crooked road from the house.

  This was a bird well out of its usual climate

  according to the map in my bird book—

  a stray, a rebel-rebel if you will,

  not flocking with birds of its feather,

  rather flying to a different drummer

  who beats his drum with the tiny bones of birds.

  But why wouldn’t every bird merit a greeting?

  a nod or at least a blink to clear the eyes—

  a wave to the geese overhead,

  maybe an inquiry of a nervous chickadee,

  a salute in the dark to the hoot of an owl.

  And as for the great blue heron,

  as motionless in profile by the shore

  as a drawing on papyrus by a Delphic priest,

  will anything serve short of a genuflection?

  As a boy, I worked on that move,

  gliding in a black cassock and white surplice

  inside the border of the altar rail

  then stopping to descend,

  one knee touching the cool marble floor

  palms pressed together in prayer,

  right thumb crossed over left, and never the other way around.

  Thanksgiving

  The thing about the huge platter

  of sliced celery, broccoli florets,

  and baby tomatoes you had arranged

  to look like a turkey with its tail fanned out

  was that all our guests were so intimidated

  by the perfection of the design

  no one dared disturb the symmetry

  by removing so much as the nub of a carrot.

  And the other thing about all that

  was that it took only a few minutes

  for the outline of the turkey to disappear

  once the guests were encouraged to dig in,

  so that no one else would have guessed

  that this platter of scattered vegetables ever bore

  the slightest resemblance to a turkey

  or any other two- or four-legged animal.

  It reminded me of the sand mandalas

  so carefully designed by Tibetan monks

  and then just as carefully destroyed

  by lines scored across the diameter of the circle,

  the variously colored sand then swept

  into a pile and carried in a vessel

  to the nearest moving water and poured in—

  a reminder of the impermanence of art and life.

  Only, in the case of the vegetable turkey

  such a reminder was never intended.

  Or if it was, I was too busy slicing up

  even more vivid lessons in impermanence

  to notice. I mean the real turkey minus its head

  and colorful feathers, and the ham

  minus the pig minus its corkscrew tail

  and minus the snout once happily slathered in mud.

  Under the Stars

  It’s very peaceful pissing under the stars

  or beneath the mild colors of twilight,

  so refreshing to take a deep breath outdoors

  then exhale all the woes of the day

  and even the l
onger woes and thorns of the year.

  Such a calm descends like a calm descending

  as you piss from a dock into a wavy lake

  and think about your many brethren,

  spread out across the land, pissing tonight

  against a tree beyond the circle of a campsite

  or watering a flowering bush at a corner of a lawn,

  some brothers holding a drink in one hand

  others content to gaze up at the passing clouds

  then down at the pissing still going on

  then up again as if there were all the time in the world.

  It’s a form of meditation only without the ashram,

  and it’s no exaggeration to say that in doing this

  you are doing what you were designed to do,

  pissing away into a dark hedge,

  just as the clouds above you are doing

  what they were made to do, being nudged by a westerly wind.

  Brother, you being yourself now

  just as the moon is perfectly being itself

  spreading its soft radiance throughout the sky

  and lighting your way back through the garden

  and across the lawn to the party you left

  where everyone is hooting and shouting

  over that song you love that’s playing so loud.

  Mister Shakespeare

  Whenever I taught “Introduction to Literature,”

  I remember how I would wince

  whenever a student, wishing to be respectful,

  would refer to “Mr. Frost,” “Mr. Hemingway,”

  or, worse yet, “Mr. Shakespeare.”

  Just write “Hemingway” or “Frost,” I would tell them,

  the way you would with a ballplayer like Jeter or Brady.

  No one writes “Mr. Jeter stole second base”

  or “Mr. Brady badly overthrew his receiver.”

  So why don’t we just call Shakespeare “Shakespeare”?

  And yet, when a living author is referred to

  by the last name only, it sounds so final,

  as if the author were already dead

  and the critical comment were part of a eulogy

  delivered over the body stretched out in a satin casket.

  When I read “The closer Bidart gets to the self…”

  or “Here Bidart addresses a former lover…”

  I feel that Frank has been reduced to English literature,

  turned into a stone where his name is chiseled

  above his dates separated by the hyphen of his life.

  Does anyone say “Good morning, Bidart”

  or “Bidart, let me freshen up that drink.”

  Only a drill sergeant would shout “BIDART!”

  in Frank’s face with some barracks in the background,

  or a teacher calling roll with a flag hanging limp in the corner.

  So odd to suddenly become subject matter

  then have some Sarah fail to identify you on a test

  or be analyzed in an essay by a young Kyle

  who is on to you and your obsession with sex.

  It’s enough to make us forget where poems begin,

  maybe in the upstairs room of an anonymous boy,

  his face illuminated by lamplight.

  He has penciled some lines in a notebook,

  and now he pauses to think up a strange and beautiful title

  while the windows of his parents’ house fill with falling leaves.

  The Influence of Anxiety: a Term Paper

  The greatest influence that anxiety can have

  is directly on the anxious person,

  the one who is suffering from the anxiety.

  For sure.

  Anxiety has two main influences

  on these people—visible and invisible.

  By visible, I mean trembling hands

  and sometimes sweating like in a cartoon

  with beads of sweat popping out of their foreheads.

  Also shifty eyes and just appearing

  to others to be acting jumpy and weird for no reason.

  It’s not hard to spot a super anxious person

  in a subway car or other form of public transportation.

  By invisible, I mean what the anxious person

  is feeling inside. For example, fear,

  sinking feelings of insecurity,

  nervousness about what the future may bring,

  and also being scared of things

  like heavy traffic, elevators, propellers,

  rapids, balancing rocks, even wind chimes

  if there is an unexpected gust of wind.

  Well, enough about how anxiety

  can have an influence on anxious people.

  What about the rest of us who are cool

  but sometimes have to put up with anxiety cases?

  In conclusion, anxiety can have

  many important influences,

  first by making some unlucky people

  all jittery and uncool

  and second, by making regular chill people

  appear to be all tense and edgy themselves.

  As I have proven, anxiety can be contagious.

  It can pass from a real loser

  to a stone member of the cool team

  just through normal everyday social contact.

  Let’s face it: if you go out with someone for pizza

  and he or she is twitching around

  in the booth or in his or her chair

  and starts getting creepy over the menu

  and looks freaked when you remind him or her

  that it’s his or her turn to pay,

  well, you can start getting creepy too,

  and it’s entirely the fault of your spooky friend,

  though you shouldn’t have suggested going for pizza in the first place.

  Goats

  (to my imaginary brother)

  If you were in the mood to get out the paint box

  and paint some goats grazing in Italy,

  this would be an excellent time to do it.

  There’s five of them up on a grassy slope

  above this spa in Umbria where a day pass

  at 22 euros allows me to swim in the pool,

  soak in the thermal baths,

  or just lounge in a chaise under an umbrella,

  all of which leaves me little time to paint goats.

  I will tell you they’re all good-sized goats,

  two being mostly white, making for a nice contrast

  with the green and blond hillside,

  the other three being darker—brown and grey.

  So think about finding your way down here,

  flipping open the old paint box

  and getting right to work,

  so that some day propped up on mother’s mantel,

  or even framed, will be your oil painting

  titled “Five Lovely Goats” or “Five Lonely Goats,”

  your handwriting being what it is,

  prompting mother, who always confuses the two of us,

  to shake her cane in your face and shout

  “And what would the likes of you be doing

  in a swimming pool in Umbria of all places?!”

  The Day After Tomorrow

  If I had to pick a favorite

  from the four heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa,

  it would have to be Álvaro de Campos,

  cast in the role of the Jaded Sensationist.

  This morning nothing much is going on,

  just the cat re-curling herself on a chair

  and the tea water coming to a boil—

  a scene Álvaro would have found entirely sufficient,

  he who failed to start or finish anything,

  who prefers the window

  to the door, tomorrow to today

  or better still, the day after tomorrow,

  that citadel of stillness, unspoiled

  by ambition or la
bor, unblemished even

  by a hand lowering a needle onto a record

  or moving a deck chair to a place in the sun.

  Yes, I like the dreamy Pessoa

  who avoids streetcars and markets,

  and who, like the snowflake, barely exists at all,

  but that’s not to say I don’t care for the others.

  Right now, out my back window,

  all four Pessoas are chasing one another

  around a big tree, holding on to their hats,

  each one somehow dressed more outlandishly

  than the others. Above them a pale sky,

  white clouds moving like sailboats over Portugal.

  I can see it all from my couch where

  I’m playing a few sad tunes on the piccolo.

  Meanwhile, the tea water has boiled away,

  and the crown of flames is working on the kettle,

  and the cat has moved to another spot.

  She loves the unmade bed, the mountainous sheets.

  A Day in May

  That was the day we made love

  in a room without a bed,

  a room of tall windows and a rose ceiling,

  and then we moved outside

  and sat there on a high deck

  watching the pelicans dive into the waves

  as we drank chilled white wine,

  and after a little while

  I put a finger in your hair and twirled it,

  and you smiled and kept looking at the sea.

  It must have been almost seven

  when I found the car keys and kissed you

  because you said you would make us

  an interesting dinner

  if I picked up some things at the market.

  And the blue sky was still illuminated

  as I walked across the parking lot

  and through the electric doors,

  for the days of the year

  were now increasing by the minute,

  and I will not soon forget how,

  after I had filled the basket

  with two brook trout,

  asparagus, lemons, and parsley,

  rum-raisin ice cream, and a watermelon,

  the check-out girl—

  no more than a junior in high school—

  handed me the change

  and told me to have a nice day.

  The Lake