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Aimless Love

Page 7

by Billy Collins


  who had just made up the business

  of the 100 Chinese silences—

  the Silence of the Night Boat,

  and the Silence of the Lotus,

  cousin to the Silence of the Temple Bell

  only deeper and softer, like petals, at its farthest edges.

  Palermo

  It was foolish of us to leave our room.

  The empty plaza was shimmering.

  The clock looked ready to melt.

  The heat was a mallet striking a ball

  and sending it bouncing into the nettles of summer.

  Even the bees had knocked off for the day.

  The only thing moving besides us

  (and we had since stopped under an awning)

  was a squirrel who was darting this way and that

  as if he were having second thoughts

  about crossing the street,

  his head and tail twitching with indecision.

  You were looking in a shop window

  but I was watching the squirrel

  who now rose up on his hind legs,

  and after pausing to look in all directions,

  began to sing in a beautiful voice

  a melancholy aria about life and death,

  his forepaws clutched against his chest,

  his face full of longing and hope,

  as the sun beat down

  on the roofs and awnings of the city,

  and the earth continued to turn

  and hold in position the moon

  which would appear later that night

  as we sat in a café

  and I stood up on the table

  with the encouragement of the owner

  and sang for you and the others

  the song the squirrel had taught me how to sing.

  Memento Mori

  It doesn’t take much to remind me

  what a mayfly I am,

  what a soap bubble floating over the children’s party.

  Standing under the bones of a dinosaur

  in a museum does the trick every time

  or confronting in a vitrine a rock from the moon.

  Even the Church of St. Anne will do,

  a structure I just noticed in a magazine—

  built in 1722 of sandstone and limestone in the city of Cork.

  And the realization that no one

  who ever breasted the waters of time

  has figured out a way to avoid dying

  always pulls me up by the reins and settles me down

  by a roadside, grateful for the sweet weeds

  and the mouthfuls of colorful wildflowers.

  So many reminders of my mortality

  here, there, and elsewhere, visible at every hour,

  pretty much everything I can think of except you,

  sign over the door of this bar in Cocoa Beach

  proclaiming that it was established—

  though established does not sound right—in 1996.

  The Guest

  I know the reason you placed nine white tulips

  in a glass vase with water

  here in this room a few days ago

  was not to mark the passage of time

  as a fish would have if nailed by the tail

  to the wall above the bed of a guest.

  But early this morning I did notice

  their lowered heads

  in the gray light,

  two of them even touching the glass

  table top near the window,

  the blossoms falling open

  as they lost their grip on themselves,

  and my suitcase only half unpacked by the door.

  Gold

  I don’t want to make too much of this,

  but because the bedroom faces east

  across a lake here in Florida,

  when the sun begins to rise

  and reflects off the water,

  the whole room is suffused with the kind

  of golden light that might travel

  at dawn on the summer solstice

  the length of a passageway in a megalithic tomb.

  Again, I don’t want to exaggerate,

  but it reminds me of a brand of light

  that could illuminate the walls

  of a hidden chamber full of treasure,

  pearls and gold coins overflowing the silver platters.

  I feel like comparing it to the fire

  that Aphrodite lit in the human eye

  so as to make it possible for us to perceive

  the other three elements,

  but the last thing I want to do

  is risk losing your confidence

  by appearing to lay it on too thick.

  Let’s just say that the morning light here

  would bring to any person’s mind

  the rings of light that Dante

  deploys in the final cantos of the Paradiso

  to convey the presence of God,

  while bringing the Divine Comedy

  to a stunning climax and leave it at that.

  Genesis

  It was late, of course,

  just the two of us still at the table

  working on a second bottle of wine

  when you speculated that maybe Eve came first

  and Adam began as a rib

  that leaped out of her side one paradisal afternoon.

  Could be, I remember saying,

  because much was possible back then,

  and I mentioned the talking snake

  and the giraffes sticking their necks out of the ark,

  their noses up in the pouring Old Testament rain.

  I like a man with a flexible mind, you said then,

  lifting your candle-lit glass to me

  and I raised mine to you and began to wonder

  what life would be like as one of your ribs—

  to be with you all the time,

  riding under your blouse and skin,

  caged under the soft weight of your breasts,

  your favorite rib, I am assuming,

  if you ever bothered to stop and count them

  which is just what I did later that night

  after you had fallen asleep

  and we were fitted tightly back to front,

  your long legs against the length of mine,

  my fingers doing the crazy numbering that comes of love.

  Horoscopes for the Dead

  Every morning since you disappeared for good,

  I read about you in the newspaper

  along with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news.

  Some days I am reminded that today

  will not be a wildly romantic time for you,

  nor will you be challenged by educational goals,

  nor will you need to be circumspect at the workplace.

  Another day, I learn that you should not miss

  an opportunity to travel and make new friends

  though you never cared much about either.

  I can’t imagine you ever facing a new problem

  with a positive attitude, but you will definitely not

  be doing that, or anything like that, on this weekday in March.

  And the same goes for the fun

  you might have gotten from group activities,

  a likelihood attributed to everyone under your sign.

  A dramatic rise in income may be a reason

  to treat yourself, but that would apply

  more to all the Pisces who are still alive,

  still swimming up and down the stream of life

  or suspended in a pool in the shade of an overhanging tree.

  But you will be relieved to learn

  that you no longer need to reflect carefully before acting

  nor do you have to think more of others,

  and never again will creative work take a back seat

  to the business responsibilities that you never really had.

  And
don’t worry today or any day

  about problems caused by your unwillingness

  to interact rationally with your many associates.

  No more goals for you, no more romance,

  no more money or children, jobs or important tasks,

  but then again, you were never thus encumbered.

  So leave it up to me now

  to plan carefully for success and the wealth it may bring,

  to value the dear ones close to my heart,

  and to welcome any intellectual stimulation that comes my way

  though that sounds like a lot to get done on a Tuesday.

  I am better off closing the newspaper,

  putting on the same clothes I wore yesterday

  (when I read that your financial prospects were looking up)

  then pushing off on my copper-colored bicycle

  and pedaling along the shore road by the bay.

  And you stay just as you are,

  lying there in your beautiful blue suit,

  your hands crossed on your chest

  like the wings of a bird who has flown

  in its strange migration not north or south

  but straight up from earth

  and pierced the enormous circle of the zodiac.

  Hell

  I have a feeling that it is much worse

  than shopping for a mattress at a mall,

  of greater duration without question,

  and there is no random pitchforking here,

  no licking flames to fear,

  only this cavernous store with its maze of bedding.

  Yet wandering past the jovial kings,

  the more sensible queens,

  and the cheerless singles

  no satin sheet will ever cover,

  I am thinking of a passage from the Inferno,

  which I could fully bring to mind

  and recite in English or even Italian

  if the salesman who has been following us—

  a crumpled pack of Newports

  visible in the pocket of his short sleeve shirt—

  would stop insisting for a moment

  that we test this one, then this softer one,

  which we do by lying down side by side,

  arms rigid, figures on a tomb,

  powerless to imagine what it would be like

  to sleep or love this way

  under the punishing rows of fluorescent lights,

  which Dante would have surely included

  had he lain on his back between us here today.

  A Question About Birds

  I am going to sit on a rock near some water

  or on a slope of grass

  under a high ceiling of white clouds,

  and I am going to stop talking

  so I can wander around in that spot

  the way John Audubon might have wandered

  through a forest of speckled sunlight,

  stopping now and then to lean

  against an elm, mop his brow,

  and listen to the songs of birds.

  Did he wonder, as I often do,

  how they regard the songs of other species?

  Would it be like listening to the Chinese

  merchants at an outdoor market?

  Or do all the birds perfectly understand one another?

  Or is that nervous chittering

  I often hear from the upper branches

  the sound of some tireless little translator?

  Watercoloring

  The sky began to tilt,

  a shift of light toward the higher clouds,

  so I seized my brush

  and dipped my little cup in the stream,

  but once I streaked the paper gray

  with a hint of green,

  water began to slide down the page,

  rivulets looking for a river.

  And again, I was too late—

  then the sky made another turn,

  this time as if to face a mirror

  held in the outstretched arm of a god.

  Poem on the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Trinity School

  When a man asked me to look back three hundred years

  Over the hilly landscape of America,

  I must have picked up the wrong pen,

  The one that had no poem lurking in its vein of ink.

  So I walked in circles for days like a blind horse

  Harnessed to an oaken pole that turns a millstone,

  A sight we might have seen so many years ago—

  Barley being ground near a swift and silent millrace—

  Which led to other sights of smoky battlefields,

  The frames of houses, then a tall steeple by a thoroughfare,

  Which I climbed and then could see even more,

  A nation being built of logs and words, ideas, and wooden nails.

  The greatest of my grandfathers was not visible,

  And the house I live in was not a pasture yet,

  Only a wooded hillside strewn with glacial rock,

  Yet I could see Dutch men and women on an island without bridges.

  And I saw winding through the scene a line of people,

  Students it would seem from their satchels and jackets,

  Three hundred of them, one for every school year

  Walking single-file over the decades into the present.

  I thought of the pages they had filled

  With letters and numbers, the lifted bits of chalk,

  The changing flag limp in the corner, the hand raised,

  The learning eye brightening to a spark in the iris.

  And then I heard their singing, all those voices

  Joined in a fluid chorus, and all those years

  Synchronized by the harmony of their anthem,

  History now a single chord, and time its key and measure.

  The Chairs That No One Sits In

  You see them on porches and on lawns

  down by the lakeside,

  usually arranged in pairs implying a couple

  who might sit there and look out

  at the water or the big shade trees.

  The trouble is you never see anyone

  sitting in these forlorn chairs

  though at one time it must have seemed

  a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.

  Sometimes there is a little table

  between the chairs where no one

  is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.

  It may not be any of my business,

  but let us suppose one day

  that everyone who placed those vacant chairs

  on a veranda or a dock sat down in them

  if only for the sake of remembering

  what it was they thought deserved

  to be viewed from two chairs,

  side by side with a table in between.

  The clouds are high and massive on that day.

  The woman looks up from her book.

  The man takes a sip of his drink.

  Then there is only the sound of their looking,

  the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird

  then another, cries of joy or warning—

  it passes the time to wonder which.

  Memorizing “The Sun Rising” by John Donne

  Every reader loves the way he tells off

  the sun, shouting busy old fool

  into the English skies even though they

  were likely cloudy on that seventeenth-century morning.

  And it’s a pleasure to spend this sunny day

  pacing the carpet and repeating the words,

  feeling the syllables lock into rows

  until I can stand and declare,

  the book held closed by my side,

  that hours, days, and months are but the rags of time.

  But after a few steps into stanza number two,

  wherein the sun is blinded by his mistress’s eyes,


  I can feel the first one begin to fade

  like the puffs of sky-written letters on a windy day.

  And by the time I have taken in the third,

  the second is likewise gone, a blown-out candle now,

  a wavering line of acrid smoke.

  So it’s not until I leave the house

  and walk three times around this hidden lake

  that the poem begins to show

  any interest in walking by my side.

  Then, after my circling,

  better than the courteous dominion

  of her being all states and him all princes,

  better than love’s power to shrink

  the wide world to the size of a bedchamber,

  and better even than the compression

  of all that into the rooms of these three stanzas

  is how, after hours stepping up and down the poem,

  testing the plank of every line,

  it goes with me now, contracted into a little spot within.

  My Unborn Children

  …of all your children,

  only those who were born.

  —Wislawa Szymborska

  I have so many of them I sometimes lose track,

  several hundred last time I counted

  but that was years ago.

  I remember one was made of marble

 

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