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Aimless Love

Page 9

by Billy Collins


  written in fine Italian ink

  and signed with a flourish of the papal sash.

  Carrara

  The Tyrrhenian Sea was bouncing off to the right

  as we headed south down the coast,

  and to the left rose the Apennine mountains,

  some with their faces quarried away,

  from where heavy blocks of white marble

  had been cut and carried down

  and stacked in rows in yards along the highway.

  Is anyone hiding within? I wondered,

  as we passed a little Fiat

  and were passed in turn by a green Lamborghini,

  hiding the way Pinocchio hid inside a log—

  maybe a David who goes by another name,

  or an anonymous girl caught dancing,

  or any other figure encased and yet to be revealed.

  Are you in there, Dawn with your sunburst halo,

  concealed from the freshly sharpened chisel?

  How about you, Spirit of Revolution

  waving a flag of marble

  and crushing the serpent of Tyranny with one foot?

  Or is nobody home, no one barely breathing

  in the heavy darkness of the pure white stone?

  Soon, we were standing on a wide beach

  where the body of Shelley had floated ashore,

  and where all those questions washed away—

  though later I pictured a sculptor wandering

  among the blocks, hands clasped behind his back,

  then deciding it was time to get to work

  on a towering likeness of his favorite English poet.

  Report from the Subtropics

  For one thing, there’s no more snow

  to watch from an evening window,

  and no armfuls of logs to carry into the house

  so cumbersome you have to touch the latch with an elbow,

  and once inside, no iron stove like an old woman

  waiting to devour her early dinner of wood.

  No hexagrams of frost to study

  on the cold glass pages of the bathroom.

  No black sweater to pull over my head

  while I wait for the coffee to brew.

  Instead, I walk around in children’s clothes—

  shorts and a tee shirt with the name of a band

  lettered on the front, announcing me to nobody.

  The sun never fails to arrive early

  and refuses to leave the party

  even after I go from room to room,

  turning out all the lights, and making a face.

  And the birds with those long white necks?

  All they do is swivel their heads

  keeping an eye on me as I walk along,

  as if they all knew my password

  and the name of the little town where I was born.

  Lesson for the Day

  I didn’t know Marianne Moore

  had written a little ode to a steam roller

  until this morning. She has it walking

  back and forth over the particles it has crushed.

  She must have watched a lot of cartoons.

  She also compares it to a butterfly unflatteringly.

  I like it better when she speaks to a snail.

  It’s pleasurable to picture her in a garden

  bending forward in her dated black clothes

  and her tilted black triangle of a hat,

  as she seriously addresses the fellow curled in its shell.

  But when I see her standing before the big drum

  of a steam roller and saying not very nice things,

  only one eventuality ever comes to mind,

  for I, too, am a serious student of cartoons.

  And no one wants to avoid seeing

  a flattened Marianne Moore hanging out to dry

  on a clothesline or propped up

  as a display in a store window more than I.

  Promenade

  As much as these erratic clouds keep sweeping

  this way and that over the roof

  of this blue house bordered by hedges and fruit trees,

  and as much as the world continues to run

  in all directions with its head in its hands,

  there is one particular robin who appears

  every morning on a section of lawn

  by the front door with such regularity

  he could be a lighthouse keeper or a clock maker.

  He could be Immanuel Kant were he not so small

  and feathered, whom the citizens set their watches by

  as he walked through town with his hair curled.

  It takes a lot to startle this bird—

  only a hand clap will make him rise

  to one of the low branches of the nearby apple tree.

  So I am wondering if he would allow me

  to slip a small collar around his neck

  and take him for a walk, first around the house

  then later, when more trust has been gained,

  into town where we would pass the locals

  with their children and orthodox dogs in tow,

  and I would hold the robin lightly by a string

  as we waited to cross the street, then he would hop

  off the curb and off we would go

  not caring about what people were saying

  even when we stopped at a store front

  to admire our strange reflections in the window.

  The Unfortunate Traveler

  Because I was off to France, I packed

  my camera along with my shaving kit,

  some colorful boxer shorts, and a sweater with a zipper,

  but every time I tried to take a picture

  of a bridge, a famous plaza,

  or the bronze equestrian statue of a general,

  there was a woman standing in front of me

  taking a picture of the very same thing,

  or the odd pedestrian blocked my view,

  someone or something always getting between me

  and the flying buttress, the river boat,

  a bright café awning, an unexpected pillar.

  So into the little door of the lens

  came not the kiosk or the altarpiece.

  No fresco or baptistry slipped by the quick shutter.

  Instead, my memories of that glorious summer

  of my youth are awakened now,

  like an ember fanned into brightness,

  by a shoulder, the back of a raincoat,

  a wide hat or towering hairdo–

  lost time miraculously recovered

  by the buttons on a gendarme’s coat

  and my favorite,

  the palm of that vigilant guard at the Louvre.

  Drinking Alone

  after Li Po

  This is not after Li Po

  the way the state is after me

  for neglecting to pay all my taxes,

  nor the way I am after

  the woman in front of me

  on the long line at the post office.

  Li Po, I am not saying

  “After you”

  as I stand holding open

  one of the heavy glass doors

  that divide the centuries

  in a long corridor of glass doors.

  No, the only way this is after you

  is in the way they say

  it’s just one thing after another,

  like the way I will pause

  to raise a glass of wine to you

  after I finish writing this poem.

  So let me get back

  to sitting in the wind alone

  among the pines with a pencil in my hand.

  After all, you had your turn,

  and mine will soon be done

  then someone else will sit here after me.

  To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl

  Do you realize that if you had started

  building
the Parthenon on the day you were born

  you would be all done in only one more year?

  Of course, you couldn’t have done it alone,

  so never mind, you’re fine just as you are.

  You are loved simply for being yourself.

  But did you know that at your age Judy Garland

  was pulling down $150,000 a picture,

  Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory,

  and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room?

  No wait, I mean he had invented the calculator.

  Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life

  after you come out of your room

  and begin to blossom, or at least pick up all your socks.

  For some reason, I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey

  was Queen of England when she was only fifteen,

  but then she was beheaded, so never mind her as a role model.

  A few centuries later, when he was your age,

  Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family

  but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies,

  four operas, and two complete Masses as a youngster.

  But of course that was in Austria at the height

  of romantic lyricism, not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.

  Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15

  or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?

  We think you are special by just being you,

  playing with your food and staring into space.

  By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,

  but that doesn’t mean he never helped out around the house.

  Animal Behavior

  Among the animals who avoid danger

  just by being still,

  the heron is a favorite example,

  indistinguishable from the reeds

  he stands in, thin and gray, at the water’s edge.

  Then there is the snowy egret

  who must think he can make

  his white question mark of a body

  just vanish from the lake

  by being as motionless as can be.

  And when it comes to people

  there’s the quiet man at the bar

  who lifts his eyes only now and then

  as well as the girl in the summer dress

  who must pretend she is not here.

  And who am I to talk,

  the last flamingo to leave the party,

  good at avoiding danger so far,

  away from any cove or shore,

  conspicuous as the drink I carry out the door.

  Lincoln

  Whatever it was that just flew out of my head

  did not leave a trace,

  not a contrail in the sky

  not a footprint in a field of new snow.

  The last thing I remember

  is reading a sentence

  in a long biography of Abraham Lincoln,

  something about his face being so ugly

  it became beautiful

  in the eyes of Walt Whitman,

  but there was something after

  that made me fold down the corner

  of the page and close the book—

  so much I cannot think of today,

  a team of white birds lifting off a shoreline

  and disappearing into the sun.

  Note to Antonín Dvorák

  Maestro, I am writing to tell you

  that your serenade in D minor

  with its stretches of martial confidence

  then some sweet wanderings of the woodwinds

  has not really brought me to the edge of anything,

  yet compared to the inane movie

  being shown on this long flight to Seattle,

  listening to your music has made me a better

  person than that other self,

  so slack of jaw and fishy of stare,

  who would have watched the movie to its end

  oblivious to the startling 33,000 feet of air below.

  I never visited your tomb in Prague

  or even the site of your former apartment

  on East 17th Street before it was demolished

  to make room for a hospital for sufferers from AIDS.

  So I am thanking you here for the lift

  of a tune to ride with over the clouds

  high above towns bisected by roads,

  and fields with their plowed circles.

  You remind me of a canary

  I once stared at for an unusually long time

  and the communion that developed between us

  as we gazed into and out of the unhooded cage.

  Time well spent, I thought,

  as the bird broke it off and began to peck

  at the image of his twin in a little oval mirror,

  leaving me to return to the many ways

  we have concocted to waste our lives—

  ten thousand at least, wouldn’t you say,

  Maestro, with your baton, your furious pencil,

  and the closet where all your dark clothes used to hang.

  Sunday Walk

  Not only colorful beds of flowers

  ruffled today by a breeze off the lake

  but the ruffled surface of the lake itself,

  and later a boathouse and an oak tree

  so old its heavy limbs rested on the ground.

  And I don’t want to leave out

  the uniformed campus guard I saw studying

  a map of the campus without a student in sight.

  Closer to town, shops under awnings

  and several churches,

  one topped with a burnished cross,

  another announcing a sermon:

  “What You Can Take with You.”

  So many odd things to see

  but mostly it’s the sun at its apex

  inscribing little circles,

  little haloes at the top of the sky,

  and the freshening breeze,

  the nowhere it came from

  and the nowhere it is headed,

  every leaf wavering, each branch bowed,

  and what can I do, I heard myself asking,

  with all this evidence of something,

  me without a candle, wafer, or a rug,

  not even a compass to tell me which way to face.

  The Suggestion Box

  It all began fairly early in the day

  at the coffee shop as it turned out

  when the usual waitress said

  I’ll bet you’re going to write a poem about this

  after she had knocked a cup of coffee into my lap.

  Then later in the morning I was told

  by a student that I should write a poem

  about the fire drill that was going on

  as we all stood on the lawn outside our building.

  In the afternoon a woman I barely knew

  said you could write a poem about that,

  pointing to a dirigible that was passing overhead.

  And if all that were not enough,

  a friend turned to me as we walked past

  a man whose face was covered with tattoos

  and said, I see a poem coming!

  Why is everyone being so helpful?

  I wondered that evening by the shore of a lake.

  Maybe I should write a poem

  about all the people who think

  they know what I should be writing poems about.

  It was just then in the fading light that I spotted

  a pair of ducks emerging

  from a cluster of reeds to paddle out to open water,

  the female glancing back over her russet shoulder

  just in time to see me searching my pockets for a pen.

  I knew it, she quacked, with a bit of a brogue.

  But who can blame you for following your heart?

  she went on.

  Now, go write
a lovely poem about me and the mister.

  Cheerios

  One bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago

  as I waited for my eggs and toast,

  I opened the Tribune only to discover

  that I was the same age as Cheerios.

  Indeed, I was a few months older than Cheerios

  for today, the newspaper announced,

  was the seventieth birthday of Cheerios

  whereas mine had occurred earlier in the year.

  Already I could hear them whispering

  behind my stooped and threadbare back,

  Why that dude’s older than Cheerios

  the way they used to say

  Why that’s as old as the hills,

  only the hills are much older than Cheerios

  or any American breakfast cereal,

  and more noble and enduring are the hills,

  I surmised as a bar of sunlight illuminated my orange juice.

  Quandary

  I was a little disappointed

  in the apple I lifted from a bowl of fruit

  and bit into on the way out the door,

  fuzzy on the inside and lacking the snap of the ripe.

  Yesterday it was probably perfect,

  I figured, as I held it out before me,

  soft red apple bearing my tooth marks,

  as if I were contemplating the bust of Aristotle.

  I considered all the people

 

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