I imagine Kafka at his desk: the nib of his pen,
like the beak of a bird, disturbs the surface of a pool of ink,
and he writes a sentence at the top of a page
changing me into a goldfish or a lost mitten
or a cord of split wood or the New York Public Library.
Ah, to awaken one morning as the New York Public Library.
I would pass the days observing old men in raincoats
as they mounted the ponderous steps between the lions
carrying wild and scribbled notes inside their pockets.
I would feel the pages of books turning inside me like butterflies.
I would stare over Fifth Avenue with a perfectly straight face.
Saturday Morning
I wonder if I have become smaller or has the bedroom
always been the size of a western state.
The aspirin bottle is in the medicine cabinet
two hundred miles away, a six day ride,
and my robe hangs from the closet door in another time zone.
A strange circumstance for one who was a giant king
last night in a principality of thimbles
where all money was smaller than dimes
and the flag over my castle displayed a flea.
But no matter. The television is right next to the bed
and Donald Duck is taking his nephews ice-skating.
Late Show
No wonder everyone loved the private dick
whose only badge is a pack of Camels
and who never dies until the movie is over
and nobody can watch him writhe.
He charges a hundred a day plus expenses,
and there would be plenty of time to relax
between cases.
The only suffering in the world would be
those blackjackings from the blind side,
his nods to mortality,
but then he fades into a soft dissolve
and comes to on a sumptuous couch,
a blonde in a nightgown rubbing his temples
and pouring brandies as she reconsiders
the doublecross.
What better style of transport
than an open car squealing along
the Coast Highway, one hand on the wheel
as you unravel the onion of the murder
so fast even she can't follow.
What better place to think things over
than a swivel chair in a darkened office,
the pulse of the neon hotel sign
illuminating your notorious face,
your hat hanging on the rack where you
tossed it on the way in.
Pie Man
I am carrying my homemade pies down a cobblestone road
that winds through a hamlet, balancing one pie
on each palm, traversing a page of fair watercolors
and ink lines, a white baker's hat collapsed on my head,
a white apron waving over my river blue pants.
Wives call to me from the frames of their cottage windows.
Children skip alongside me, their sunny faces uplifted.
My high jaunty strides show I love my trade.
You may remember the first time you saw me,
sitting in someone's lap as she turned the pages
of a thin book dropped long ago on the banks of childhood.
You may even remember some details like the rows
of fork holes in the crusts, the rising curlicues of steam,
my buckled shoes, the red lettering on my handcart.
It is a picture that will soon pale as it did before,
the pies, the hat, cobblestones and children breaking
into pieces and drifting off as objects do in space.
This may be the last time you think of me or I of you.
Think of the color of the shutters, the painted bridge,
the shapes of clouds, the wooden sign above the cheese shop.
Wolf
A wolf is reading a book of fairy tales.
The moon hangs over the forest, a lamp.
He is not assuming a human position,
say, cross-legged against a tree,
as he would in a cartoon.
This is a real wolf, standing on all fours,
his rich fur bristling in the night air,
his head bent over the book open on the ground.
He does not sit down for the words
would be too far away to be legible,
and it is with difficulty that he turns
each page with his nose and forepaws.
When he finishes the last tale
he lies down in pine needles.
He thinks about what he has read,
the stories passing over his mind
like the clouds crossing the moon.
A zigzag of wind shakes down hazelnuts.
The eyes of owls yellow in the branches.
The wolf now paces restlessly in circles
around the book until he is absorbed
by the power of its narration,
making him one of its illustrations,
a small paper wolf, flat as print.
Later that night, lost in a town of pigs,
he knocks over houses with his breath.
The History Teacher
Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.
And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.
The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
“How far is it from here to Madrid?”
“What do you call the matador's hat?”
The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom
on Japan.
The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,
while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.
Pensée
All of Paris must have been away on holiday
when Pascal said that men are not happy
because they are incapable of staying in their rooms.
It is the kind of thought that belongs in a room,
sealed off from the vanities of the world,
polished roadsters, breasts, hunting lodges,
all letdowns in the end.
But imagine Columbus examining the wallpaper,
Magellan straightening up the dresser,
Lindbergh rearranging some magazines on a table.
Not to mention the need for everyday explorations,
the wandering we do, randomly as ants,
when we rove through woods without direction
or allow the diagram of a foreign city to lead us
through long afternoons of unpronounceable streets.
Then we are like children in playgrounds
who are discovering the art of running in circles
as if they were scribbling on the earth with their bodies.
We die only when we run out of footprints.
Then the biographers move in to retrace our paths,
enclosing them in tall mazes of lumber
to make our lives seem more complex, more arduous,
to make our leaving the room seem heroic.
The Discovery of Scat
Long before Dizzy,
high on the rising tower at Babel
a bearded carpenter tu
rned
to a stonemason
(barely able to see him
through the veil of clouds),
turned to ask for a wooden nail
and said something
that sounded like
bop ah dooolyah bop.
Dog
I can hear him out in the kitchen,
his lapping the night's only music,
head bowed over the waterbowl
like an illustration in a book for boys.
He enters the room with such etiquette,
licking my bare ankle as if he understood
the Braille of the skin.
Then he makes three circles around himself,
flattening his ancient memory of tall grass
before dropping his weight with a sigh on the floor.
This is the spot where he will spend the night,
his ears listening for the syllable of his name,
his tongue hidden in his long mouth
like a strange naked hermit in a cave.
The Willies
“Public restrooms give me the willies.”
—AD FOR A DISINFECTANT
There is no known cure for them,
unlike the heeby-jeebies
or the shakes
which Russian vodka and a hot bath
will smooth out.
The drifties can be licked,
though the vapors often spell trouble.
The whips-and-jangles
go away in time. So do the fantods.
And good company will put the blues
to flight
and do much to relieve the flips,
the quivers and the screamies.
But the willies are another matter.
Anything can give them to you:
electric chairs, raw meat, manta rays,
public restrooms, a footprint,
and every case of the willies
is a bad one.
Some say flow with them, ride them out,
but this is useless advice
once you are in their grip.
There is no way to get on top
of the willies. Valium
is ineffective. Hospitals
are not the answer.
Keeping still
and emitting thin, evenly spaced
waves of irony
may help
but don't expect miracles:
the willies are the willies.
On Reading in the Morning Paper That Dreams May Be Only Nonsense
We might have guessed as much, given the nightly
absurdities, the extravagant circus of the dark.
You hit the pillow and moments later your mother
appears as a llama, shouting at you in another language.
Or you find yourself drowning in a sea of breasts,
or drowning in a sea of basketballs—
those who have attended night school will be quick
to explain the difference.
Or the nonsense is just a scrambling of the day before,
everyone walking around the office stark naked,
the elevator doors opening on to deep space,
the clamshells from lunch floating by in slow motion.
Too bad Freud isn't here to hear this news,
maybe some pharaohs too, druids and wide-eyed diviners,
all gathered around my kitchen table
in their exotic clothes, their pale mouths moving
silently, as in a dream,
and me pouring coffee for everyone, proffering smokes,
pacing around in my bathrobe reading the paper out loud.
But the scene would soon swirl away
and I would find myself alone in some fix,
screaming within the confines of an hourglass,
being driven to the opera by a blind chauffeur
or waking up to the chilling evidence on the bedroom floor:
a small pile of sand, a white bow tie.
Rip Van Winkle
The illustrations always portray him outdoors,
sleeping at the base of a generous oak,
acorns bouncing off his elfin cap,
the beard grown over him like a blanket.
Here reclines the patron saint of sleep.
He has sawed enough logs to heat the Land of Nod.
His dreams are longer than all of Homer.
And the Z above his head looks anchored in the air.
You would think a forest animal would trouble
his slumber, the paw of a bear on his paunch,
but squirrels hop over his benign figure
and by now the birds are unafraid of his rhythmic snoring.
In the next valley the world probably goes on,
hammering and yelling and staying up late at night
while around his head flowers open and close
and leaves or snow fall as he sleeps through the seasons.
Some mornings, awakened by the opera of dawn,
I think of his recumbrance, his serene repose
as I open my eyes after a paltry eight hours,
pointlessly alert, gaudy with consciousness.
English Country House
I pass under the arched entrance to my hedge-maze
and move into its argument of corridors,
running a hand along the leafy walls, perfectly trimmed.
I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body,
balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
I continue into the secret patterns of its side-lanes,
savoring the conundrum of every manicured corner and turn.
At the end of a cul-de-sac I sit down on a white bench,
a place to rest and bask in one's befuddlement.
Then I walk on trying to forget the guests I abandoned.
I should be with them now wilting in a lawn chair
and talking over tea and lemon slices instead of watching
clouds pass over this crazy bower, this sweet labyrinth.
But people are not captivating as they were a decade ago
when the famous would come here to follow their diversions,
Stubbs agitating over a sketchbook of Thoroughbreds,
Muybridge outdoors taking photographs of a naked boxer.
I remember Johann Mälzel inventing the metronome
in an upper room. In this soft afternoon light
I remember Roget walking up from the meadow,
his basket full of synonyms, the dogs barking at his clothes.
I remember them all as I stand here in the dark green center.
Nostalgia
Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.
Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.
The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time t
o be alive, or even dead.
I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.
Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.
As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following magazines in which many of these poems, some in earlier versions, have appeared: ACM, Black Warrior Review, Boulevard, Field, The Florida Review, Free Lunch, The Georgia Review, The Jacaranda Review, The Kansas Quarterly, Oxford Magazine, The Paris Review, Pearl, Slow Dancer, The Wooster Review, Wordsmith, The Wormwood Review.
“The Afterlife,” “American Sonnet,” “The Death of Allegory,” “First Reader,” “Forgetfulness,” “The History of Weather,” “Mappamundi,” and “Student of Clouds” first appeared in Poetry.
The author gratefully acknowledges the National Endowment for the Arts and the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program of the City University of New York for their generous support.
Billy Collins is the author of five books of poetry, including Picnic, Lightning, The Art of Drowning—a finalist for the 1996 Lenore Marshall Prize, and The Apple That Astonished Paris. Collins's poetry has appeared in anthologies, textbooks, and a variety of periodicals, including Poetry, American Poetry Review, American Scholar, Harper's, Paris Review, and The New Yorker. His work has been featured in the Pushcart Prize anthology and The Best American Poetry for 1992, 1993, and 1997. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has also won the Bess Hokin Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize, the Oscar Blumenthal Prize, and the Levinson Prize—all awarded by Poetry magazine. In 1992, he was chosen by the New York Public Library to serve as a “Literary Lion.” He has given readings at numerous colleges and other institutions. For several years he has conducted summer poetry workshops in Ireland at University College Galway. He is professor of English at Lehman College, CUNY.
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