As usual, it was easy to accept the lake
and its surroundings,
to take at face value the thick reeds
along the shore, a little platoon of ducks,
a turtle sunning itself on a limb half submerged,
and the big surface of the lake itself
the water sometimes glassy, other times ruffled.
Why, Henry David Thoreau or anyone
even vaguely familiar with the role
of the picturesque in 19th century
American landscape painting
would feel perfectly at home in its presence.
And that is why I felt so relieved to discover
in the midst of all this familiarity
a note of skepticism,
or call it a Dadaist paradox.
And if not a remark worthy of Oscar Wilde
then surely a sign of impertinence was here
in the casual fuck-you attitude
so perfectly expressed by the anhinga
drying its extended wings
in the morning breeze
while perched on a decoy of a Canada goose.
Solvitur Ambulando
“It is solved by walking.”
I sometimes wonder about the thoughtful Roman
who came up with the notion
that any problem can be solved by walking.
Maybe his worries were minor enough
to be banished by a little amble
along the paths of his gardens,
or, if he faced a tough one—
whether to invite Lavinia or Pomponia to the feast—
walking to the Coliseum would show him the one to pick.
The maxim makes it sound so simple:
go for a walk until you find a solution
then walk back home with a clear head.
No problem, as they used to say in ancient Rome.
But one night, a sticky one might take you
for a walk past the limits of a city,
beyond the streetlights of its suburbs,
and there you are, knocking on the door of a farmer,
who keeps you company on the porch
until your wife comes to fetch you
and drive you and your problem back home,
your problem taking up most of the back seat
and staring at your wife in the rear-view mirror.
And what about the mathematician
who tried to figure out some devilish
mind-crusher like Goldbach’s conjecture
and taking the Latin to heart,
walked to the very bottom of Patagonia?
There he stood on a promontory,
so the locals like to tell you,
staring beyond the end of the hemisphere,
with nothing but the cries of seabirds,
waves exploding on the rocks,
clouds rushing down the sky,
and him having figured the whole thing out.
Fire
Is there anyone out there
who can name a movie about a writer
of the eighteenth or nineteenth century
that does not feature a fireplace
into whose manic flames are tossed,
usually one at a time,
the pages of a now lost literary masterpiece?
The scene could be a manor house or a hovel,
the fire doesn’t know the difference
any more than it can distinguish a chit
from a poem that could change the direction of literature.
The culprit is usually a rival,
or the wife, driven mad by neglect,
or a mistress, her damp hair in tendrils,
but the best destroyer of all is the author himself
standing transfixed by the mantel
as he undoes all the good he has ever done.
And that is what I saw tonight
here from my chair across the room—
an actor playing Coleridge burning
the fresh, hand-written pages of “Kubla Khan,”
his drug-haunted face flickering above the flames.
So far, I have been immune to such romance.
All my good pages are right here on the desk.
The only fire in this house is
the pilot light burning in the kitchen.
My wife kissed me and went to bed hours ago,
and my only rival was killed in a duel
on a snowy field somewhere in Russia
one hundred and thirty-five years ago today.
Bachelorette Party
When you told me you’d been invited to one,
I pictured a room full of tiny bachelors
in miniature slacks and natty sports jackets
and in the background a stack of boxes
tied with bows, which one of them would get to open.
But first they would have lots of drinks
and clink their little glasses
of peaty single-malt whiskeys
and talk about cars and the sport of the season
until a long awkward silence would set in
and one of them would suggest they go out
and look for some single women their size,
leaving the badly wrapped presents unopened in a pile.
And none of that would have occurred to me
if there were a separate word for a party
thrown for a woman looking forward
to pulling a big white dress over her head,
maybe a word from Hindi, or a brand new one,
instead of just an old word with a suffix
tied to its bumper along with a bunch of empty tin cans.
Oh, Lonesome Me
Again I woke up to no one’s smile
unless you count the face
formed by the closet doorknob,
the tiny mouth of the keyhole
looking comically surprised at its bulbous nose.
It was Stephen Crane’s month
on my Calendar of American Authors,
but he was clearly not smiling,
and my grandfather looked displeased
at the frame I had chosen for his portrait.
Not ornate enough, his eyes seemed to say.
The lid on the piano was closed
so I could not see its lavish smile,
but then who comes gamboling to the rescue
but Elsie the Cow, grinning broadly
from her place on the carton of milk
I was tipping into my bowl of cereal.
Commendable is the constancy of her glee,
sustained all through the night
in the darkness of the refrigerator
then unveiled in the sunny kitchen of morning.
And encircling her head is a garland of daisies,
woven no doubt by someone on the farm,
who then entered the pasture
and settled them around her magnificent neck.
Likely, it’s the handiwork of a girl,
maybe one of the daughters, perhaps an only child.
But where is she now?
When did she leave?
And by what river or seashore does she dwell?
Meditation
I was sitting cross-legged one morning
in our sunny new meditation room
wondering if it would be okay
to invite our out-of-town guest
to Frank’s dinner party next weekend
when it occurred to me
that I wasn’t really meditating at all.
In fact, I had never meditated
in our sunny new meditation room.
I had just sat cross-legged
now and then for 15 or 20 minutes
worrying about one thing or another,
how the world will end
or what to get Alice for her birthday.
It would make more sense
to rename the meditation room
&nbs
p; our new exercise room
and to replace all the candles,
incense holders, and the little statues
with two ten-pound hand weights
and a towel in case I broke a sweat.
Then I pictured the new room
with nothing in it but a folded white towel,
and a pair of numbered hand weights—
an image of such simplicity
that the sustaining of it
as I sat cross-legged under a tall window,
my palms open weightlessly on my bare knees,
made me wonder if I wasn’t actually
meditating for a moment then and there
in our former meditation room,
where the sun seemed to be brightening
as it suffused with light the grain
in the planks of that room’s gleaming floor.
Poem to the First Generation of People to Exist After the Death of the English Language
I’m not going to put a lot of work into this
because you won’t be able to read it anyway,
and I’ve got more important things to do
this morning, not the least of which
is to try to write a fairly decent poem
for the people who can still read English.
Who could have foreseen English finding
a place in the cemetery of dead languages?
I once imagined English placing flowers
at the tombstones of its parents, Latin and Anglo-Saxon,
but you people can actually visit its grave
on a Sunday afternoon if you still have days of the week.
I remember the story of the last speaker
of Dalmatian being tape-recorded in his hut
as he was dying under a horse-hair blanket.
But English? English seemed for so many of us
the only true way to describe the world
as if reality itself were English
and Adam and Eve spoke it in the garden
using words like snake, apple, and perdition.
Of course, there are other words for things
but what could be better than boat,
pool, swallow (both the noun and the verb),
statuette, tractor, squiggly, surf, and underbelly?
I’m sorry.
I’ve wasted too much time on this already.
You carry on however you do
without the help of English, communicating
with dots in the air or hologram hats or whatever.
You’re just like all the ones who say
they can’t understand poetry
but at least you poor creatures have an excuse.
So I’m going to turn the page
and not think about you and your impoverishment.
Instead, I’m going to write a poem about red poppies
waving by the side of the railroad tracks,
and you people will never even know what you’re missing.
What a Woman Said to Me After a Reading in the Napa Valley
That many years ago she had a chance
to hear Yehuda Amichai
read his poems at a college in Santa Cruz,
but a boy had invited her to go for a walk
that would lead up a path into the nearby hills,
so she decided to go for the walk with the boy instead.
To have missed what turned out to be
her only chance to hear the great Israeli poet
filled her with regret to this day,
but she clearly remembered the walk,
especially the afternoon light on the green hills,
though by now she had forgotten the name of the boy.
I told her it sounded like she had the makings
of a poem there, what with Amichai,
the California light on the hills, and the forgotten boy.
Then I drove off through the dormant vineyards
wondering if the woman had ever written a poem herself
and, if not, why in the world would she want to start now?
Joy
It’s not often that I see the sun rise
and set on the same day as I did the other day.
It’s easy to tell which is which
even if you just emerged from a coma—
the rising is a theatre of silvery air,
and the setting done and imbued by gold.
On the morning I’m thinking about
it rose over a low cluster of clouds
then burst forth and lit up the sunny side of everything.
And when it went down, it went down
in a cauldron of molten metal
and seemed to shudder in a foundry of its own making.
When I lay in the dark that night
I imagined the sun shining down on Asia,
always rising and setting somewhere
waking some people, sending others to bed
as it does in that love poem by John Donne.
And I thought of the sun advancing
in its own grander orbit, a father taking
the family of planets for a ride through the Milky Way.
What a brazen wonder to be alive on earth
amid the clockwork of all this motion!
This was in Key West. It was January
when the early morning hours can be chilly.
I remember putting on a sweater
then stepping out onto the deck
with the newspaper under my arm
and checking out the water and the sky
before lighting up a big El Stinko cigar.
for Suzannah
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author gratefully acknowledges the editors of the following periodicals where some of these poems first appeared.
American Poetry Review: “Hendrik Goltzius’s ‘Icarus’ (1588),” “One Leg of the Journey,” “Under the Stars,” “Santorini,” “Only Child,” “Lucky Cat”
The Atlantic: “The Five Spot, 1964”
Boulevard: “Poem to the First Generation of People to Exist After the Death of the English Language”
Brilliant Corners: “1960”
Five Points: “Bravura,” “Helium,” “Dream Life,” “Fire,” “The Night of the Fallen Limb,” “Species”
Fulcrum: “Muybridge’s Lobsters”
The Irish Times: “Bags of Time,” “Genuflection”
The Kenyon Review: “Sixteen Years Old, I Help Bring in the Hay on My Uncle John’s Farm with Two French-Canadian Workers”
The New Yorker: “Tanager,” “Cosmology”
New Ohio Review: “The Lake,” “The Present”
Plume: “In Praise of Ignorance,” “Many Moons,” “Note to J. Alfred Prufrock”
Rhapsody: “The Bard in Flight”
Shenandoah: “Child Lost at the Beach”
The Southampton Review: “Early Morning,” “Oh, Lonesome Me,” “Traffic,” “Goats,” “Portrait,” “Predator”
T Magazine (The New York Times): “Greece”
“Speed Walking on August 31, 2013,” for Seamus Heaney, was printed in the program for his memorial service in Dublin.
—
I’m grateful to Bob and Laura Sillerman for their innumerable kindnesses and to Dana Prescott, my host at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, where some of these poems were written. Thanks also to the many helpful people at Random House, especially my new editor Andrea Walker.
Great appreciation to Suzannah Gilman, whose pencil sharpened many of these poems, and to George Green, who graded them with his usual empathetic severity.
BY BILLY COLLINS
The Rain in Portugal
Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems
Horoscopes for the Dead
Ballistics
The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems
Nine Horses
Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
Picnic, Lightning
The Art of Drowning
Questions About Angels
The Apple That Astonished Paris
EDITED BY BILLY COLLINS
Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds (illustrations by David Allen Sibley)
180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day
Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BILLY COLLINS is the author of eleven collections of poetry and the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds. He was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006. A former Distinguished Professor at Lehman College (City University of New York), he is a Distinguished Fellow of the Rollins Winter Park Institute and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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