Nine Horses

by Billy Collins

  And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.

  There is no way you are the pine-scented air.

  It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,

  maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,

  but you are not even close

  to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

  And a quick look in the mirror will show

  that you are neither the boots in the corner

  nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

  It might interest you to know,

  speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,

  that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

  I also happen to be the shooting star,

  the evening paper blowing down an alley,

  and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

  I am also the moon in the trees

  and the blind woman’s teacup.

  But don’t worry, I am not the bread and the knife.

  You are still the bread and the knife.

  You will always be the bread and the knife,

  not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

  The Return of the Key

  It was a drowsy summer afternoon,

  hot wind stirring the papers in the room,

  smoke slanting up from my cigarette

  as from a tiny factory that produced only smoke.

  I was reading William Carlos Williams,

  growing weary of the note on the kitchen table

  and the broken glass on the roadside,

  so I reached into one of his small poems

  and lifted out a tiny key

  lying on a glass tray next to a glass tumbler

  in a room of an inn where someone stood

  in the doorway holding a suitcase.

  I knew all things come in threes,

  so I was not discouraged when the key

  did not open the golden lock

  on my daughter’s diary,

  or the empty strongbox under the bed,

  and I knew I was getting warm

  when I entered the orangerie

  and stood before the birdcage on its metal stand.

  Small wonder that the bird

  fluttered into the air

  and circled the chandelier

  as soon as the little door swung open.

  Smaller wonder

  that it banked sharply

  against a background of windows,

  then dove and disappeared

  into the anthology of American poetry

  that lay open on the table—

  the key clenched in its beak,

  the pages lifting like many wings in the breeze.

  The Listener

  I cannot see you a thousand miles from here,

  but I can hear you

  whenever you cough in your bedroom

  or when you set down

  your wineglass on a granite counter.

  This afternoon

  I even heard scissors moving

  at the tips of your hair

  and the dark snips falling

  onto a marble floor.

  I keep the jazz

  on the radio turned off.

  I walk across the floor softly,

  eyes closed,

  the windows in the house shut tight.

  I hear a motor on the road in front,

  a plane humming overhead,

  someone hammering,

  then there is nothing

  but the white stone building of silence.

  You must be asleep

  for it to be this quiet,

  so I will sit and wait

  for the rustle of your blanket

  or a noise from your dream.

  Meanwhile, I will listen to the ant bearing

  a dead comrade

  across these floorboards—

  the noble sounds

  of his tread and his low keening.

  The Literary Life

  I woke up this morning,

  as the blues singers like to boast,

  and the first thing to enter my mind,

  as the dog was licking my face, was Coventry Patmore.

  Who was Coventry Patmore?

  I wondered, as I rose

  and set out on my journey to the encyclopedia

  passing some children and a bottle cap on the way.

  Everything seemed more life-size than usual.

  Light in the shape of windows

  hung on the walls next to the paintings

  of birds and horses, flowers and fish.

  Coventry Patmore,

  I’m coming to get you, I hissed,

  as I entered the library like a man stepping

  into a freight elevator of science and wisdom.

  How many things have I looked up

  in a lifetime of looking things up?

  I wondered, as I set the book on the piano

  and began turning its large, weightless pages.

  How would the world look

  if all of its things were neatly arranged

  in alphabetical order? I wondered,

  as I found the P section and began zeroing in.

  How long before I would forget Coventry Patmore’s

  dates and the title of his long poem

  on the sanctity of married love?

  I asked myself as I closed the door to that room

  and stood for a moment in the kitchen,

  taking in the silvery toaster, the bowl of lemons,

  and the white cat, looking as if

  he had just finished his autobiography.

  The Great Walter Pater

  In the middle of the formal gardens,

  laid out with fastidious symmetry

  behind the gray stone château,

  right at the center

  where all the gravel paths lead the eye,

  at the point where all the hedges

  and the vivid flower beds converge,

  is a small rectangular pond with a flagstone edge,

  and in the center of that pond is a statue

  of a naked boy holding a jar on one shoulder,

  and from the mouth of that jar

  a fine stream of water issues forth night and day.

  I never for a minute wanted

  to be a nightingale or a skylark

  or a figure immobilized on the slope of an urn,

  but when the dogs of trouble

  have me running down a dark winding alley,

  I would not mind being that boy—

  or, if that is not possible,

  I would choose, like the great Walter Pater,

  to be one of the large, orange carp

  that live under the surface of that pond,

  swimming back and forth all summer long

  in the watery glitter of sinking coins,

  resting all winter, barely moving

  under a smooth, translucent sheet of ice.

  By a Swimming Pool Outside Siracusa

  All afternoon I have been struggling

  to communicate in Italian

  with Roberto and Giuseppe who have begun

  to resemble the two male characters

  in my Italian for Beginners,

  the ones always shopping, eating,

  or inquiring about the times of trains.

  Now I can feel my English slipping away,

  like chlorinated water through my fingers.

  I have made important pronouncements

  in this remote limestone valley

  with its trickle of a river.

  I stated that it seems hotter

  today even than it was yesterday

  and that swimming is very good for you,

  very beneficial, you might say.

  I also posed burning questions

  about the hours of the archaeological museum

  and the location of the local necropolis.

  But now I am alone in th
e evening light

  which has softened the white cliffs,

  and I have had a little gin in a glass with ice

  which has softened my mood or—

  how would you say in English—

  has allowed my thoughts to traverse my brain

  with greater gentleness, shall we say,

  or, to put it less literally,

  this drink has extended permission

  to my mind to feel—what’s the word?—

  a friendship with the vast sky

  which is very—give me a minute—very blue

  but with much great paleness

  at this special time of day, or as we say in America, now.

  Bermuda

  When we walk down the bleached-out wooden stairs

  to the beach and lie on our backs

  on the blue and white chaises

  near the edge of the water

  on this dot in the atlas,

  this single button on the blazer of the sea,

  we come about as close

  as a man and a woman can

  to doing nothing.

  All morning long we watch the clouds

  roll overhead

  or close our eyes and do the lazy

  back-and-forth of talk,

  our voices flattened by the drone of surf,

  our words tumbling oddly in the wind.

  It’s Good Friday here, hundreds of miles

  from any mass of land,

  thousands from Calvary.

  Wild hibiscus twists along the roadsides,

  the yellow-breasted bird sings its name,

  and all the stores are closed

  because today is the day to make hot cross buns

  and fly kites from the beaches—

  to eat the sweet cross,

  to fix with a string a cross in the sky.

  The white sand heats up

  as one of us points out the snout of a pig

  on the horizon, and higher up

  a gaping alligator poised to eat a smaller cloud.

  See how that one is a giant head,

  like the devil wearing glasses

  you say, but my eyes are shut against the sun

  and I only hear your words,

  softened and warped by the sea breeze,

  telling me how the head is becoming a bicycle,

  the high-wheel kind on playing cards,

  while the sea rushes in, falls back—

  marbles pouring endlessly onto a marble floor—

  and the two of us so calm

  it seems that this is not our only life,

  just one in a series, charms on a bracelet,

  as if every day we were not running

  like the solitary runners on the beach

  toward a darkness without shape

  or waves, crosses or clouds,

  as if one of us is not likely to get there first

  leaving the other behind,

  castaway on an island

  with no pink houses or blue shutters,

  no plum-colored ones trimmed in cream,

  no offshore reef to burst the waves into foam,

  and no familiar voice being bent in the wind.

  Ignorance

  It’s only a cold, cloud-hooded weekday

  in the middle of winter,

  but I am sitting up in my body

  like a man riding an elephant

  draped with a carpet of red and gold,

  his turban askew,

  singing a song about the return of the cranes.

  And I am inside my own head

  like a tiny homunculus,

  a creature so excited over his naked existence

  that he scurries all day

  from one eye socket to the other

  just to see what scenes are unfolding before me,

  what streets, what pastures.

  And to think that just hours ago

  I was as sour as Samuel Johnson

  with a few bad sherries in him,

  quarreling in a corner of the Rat and Parrot,

  full of scorn for the impertinence of men,

  the inconstancy of women.

  And to think further that I have no idea

  what might have uplifted me,

  unless it was when I first opened

  the front door to look at the sky

  so extensive and burdened with snow,

  or was it this morning

  when I walked along the reservoir?

  Was it when the dog

  scared up some ducks off the water

  and I stopped to watch them flapping low

  over the frozen surface,

  and I counted them in flight,

  all seven—the leader and the six hurrying behind.

  Death in New Orleans, a Romance

  Long into the night my pencil

  hurried across the page,

  a young messenger boy

  running his nervous little errands,

  making lines,

  making comparisons—

  the world is like this, the moon like that,

  the mind, I wrote, is like a wire birdcage

  hanging from a stand

  with a wooden perch and a tiny mirror,

  home of a single canary,

  I went on,

  always the same one, the same song every day,

  then quiet under the floral hood of night.

  Always the same yellow and white feathers,

  I continued,

  yellow for the past, white for the future—

  I added for symbolic weight—

  and on the day I die,

  I wrote, curving toward the elegiac,

  the wire door will swing open

  and the bird take flight,

  looping over the ironwork of the city,

  the water tanks and windowed buildings,

  then up into the clouds and stars,

  I typed,

  leaving my body behind,

  slumped upon a café table,

  my empty head in a pool of wine,

  the waiter and two customers

  bending over me with obvious concern.

  Air Piano

  Now that all the twilight has seeped

  out of the room

  and I am alone listening,

  the bass is beginning to sound

  like my father

  ascending the flights of stairs,

  always the same cadence

  every weekday evening,

  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, perhaps,

  is someone’s younger brother

  who moved out west and never writes

  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,

  a red bow tied around its leg

  while snow fell on the house

  and the long rows of hemlocks.

  Since then, I have learned some chords

  and a few standards,

  but I still love lying on the floor

  like this, eyes closed,

  hands locked behind my head,

  laying down the solo on “Out of the Blue”

  in the Fantasy Studios,

  Berkeley, California,

  on October 4th, 1951, when I was ten.

  Drawing

  Ink strokes on rice paper—

  a wooden bridge

  curved over a river,

  mountains in the distance,

  and in the foreground

  a wind-blown tree.

 
I rotate the book on the table

  so the tree

  is leaning toward your village.

  To My Patron

  I do not require a ton of pink marble,

  a hundred tubes of paint,

  or an enormous skylit loft.

  All I need is a pen,

  a little blank notebook,

  and a lamp with a seventy-five-watt bulb.

  Of course, an oak desk would be nice,

  maybe a chair of ergonomic design,

  and a collie lying on an oval rug,

  always ready to follow me anywhere

  or just sniff my empty palm.

  And I would not turn down a house

  canopied by shade trees,

  a swing suspended from a high limb,

  flowering azaleas around the porch,

  pink, red, and white.

  I might as well add to the list

  a constant supply of pills

  that would allow me to stay awake all night

  without blinking,

  a cellar full of dusty bottles of Bordeaux,

  a small radio—

  nothing, I assure you, would go unappreciated.

  Now if you wouldn’t mind

  leaving me alone—

  and please close the door behind you