Copyright © 2013 by Billy Collins.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
ISBN 978-0-679-64405-7
eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-8465-1
www.atrandom.com
Book design by Dana Leigh Blanchette
Title-page and part-title photograph: © iStockphoto.com
v3.1
Little soul
little stray
little drifter
now where will you stay
all pale and all alone
after the way
you used to make fun of things?
—Hadrian
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Reader
FROM NINE HORSES
(2002)
The Country
Velocity
“More Than a Woman”
Aimless Love
Absence
Royal Aristocrat
Paris
Istanbul
Love
Obituaries
Today
Creatures
Tipping Point
Nine Horses
Litany
The Literary Life
Writing in the Afterlife
No Time
Elk River Falls
Christmas Sparrow
Surprise
Poetry
FROM THE TROUBLE WITH POETRY
(2005)
Monday
Statues in the Park
House
The Long Day
In the Evening
Flock
Building with Its Face Blown Off
The Lanyard
Boy Shooting at a Statue
Genius
The Order of the Day
The Centrifuge
The Revenant
Carry
Fool Me Good
The Trouble with Poetry
FROM BALLISTICS
(2008)
Brightly Colored Boats Upturned on the Banks of the Charles
Searching
High
The Four-Moon Planet
No Things
The First Night
January in Paris
Ballistics
Pornography
Greek and Roman Statuary
Scenes of Hell
Hippos on Holiday
Lost
Tension
The Golden Years
(detail)
Adage
The Flight of the Statues
Baby Listening
Bathtub Families
The Fish
A Dog on His Master
The Great American Poem
Divorce
This Little Piggy Went to Market
Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant
Oh, My God!
The Future
Envoy
FROM HOROSCOPES FOR THE DEAD
(2011)
Grave
Palermo
Memento Mori
The Guest
Gold
Genesis
Horoscopes for the Dead
Hell
Watercoloring
Poem on the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Trinity School
The Chairs That No One Sits In
Memorizing “The Sun Rising” by John Donne
My Unborn Children
Hangover
Table Talk
Delivery
What She Said
Drawing You from Memory
Cemetery Ride
Lakeside
My Hero
Poetry Workshop Held in a Former Cigar Factory in Key West
Returning the Pencil to Its Tray
NEW POEMS
The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska
Foundling
Catholicism
Carrara
Report from the Subtropics
Lesson for the Day
Promenade
The Unfortunate Traveler
Drinking Alone
To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl
Animal Behavior
Lincoln
Note to Antonín Dvorák
Sunday Walk
The Suggestion Box
Cheerios
Quandary
Elusive
Looking for a Friend in a Crowd of Arriving Passengers: A Sonnet
Digging
Central Park
Osprey
Here and There
Villanelle
Lines Written at Flying Point Beach
Lines Written in a Garden by a Cottage in Herefordshire
American Airlines #371
Keats: or How I Got My Negative Capability Back
The Music of the Spheres
Orient
Heraclitus on Vacation
Ode to a Desk Lamp
Irish Poetry
After the Funeral
Best Fall
France
All Eyes
Rome in June
The Deep
Biographical Notes in an Anthology of Haiku
Florida in December
Dining Alone
Lucky Bastards
“I Love You”
Unholy Sonnet #1
If This Were a Job I’d Be Fired
Friends in the Dark
Flying Over West Texas at Christmas
Last Meal
A Word About Transitions
The Names
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Reader
Looker, gazer, skimmer, skipper,
thumb-licking page turner, peruser,
you getting your print-fix for the day,
pencil-chewer, note taker, marginalianist
with your checks and X’s
first-timer or revisiter,
browser, speedster, English major,
flight-ready girl, melancholy boy,
invisible companion, thief, blind date, perfect stranger—
that is me rushing to the window
to see if it’s you passing under the shade trees
with a baby carriage or a dog on a leash,
me picking up the phone
to imagine your unimaginable number,
me standing by a map of the world
wondering where you are—
alone on a bench in a train station
or falling asleep, the book sliding to the floor.
FROM NINE HORSES
(2002)
The Country
I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice
might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.
Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe
behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,
th
e blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time—
now a fire-starter, now a torch-bearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,
lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, one-time inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?
Velocity
In the club car that morning I had my notebook
open on my lap and my pen uncapped,
looking every inch the writer
right down to the little writer’s frown on my face,
but there was nothing to write about
except life and death
and the low warning sound of the train whistle.
I did not want to write about the scenery
that was flashing past, cows spread over a pasture,
hay rolled up meticulously—
things you see once and will never see again.
But I kept my pen moving by drawing
over and over again
the face of a motorcyclist in profile—
for no reason I can think of—
a biker with sunglasses and a weak chin,
leaning forward, helmetless,
his long thin hair trailing behind him in the wind.
I also drew many lines to indicate speed,
to show the air becoming visible
as it broke over the biker’s face
the way it was breaking over the face
of the locomotive that was pulling me
toward Omaha and whatever lay beyond Omaha
for me, all the other stops to make
before the time would arrive to stop for good.
We must always look at things
from the point of view of eternity,
the college theologians used to insist,
from which, I imagine, we would all
appear to have speed lines trailing behind us
as we rush along the road of the world,
as we rush down the long tunnel of time—
the biker, of course, drunk on the wind,
but also the man reading by a fire,
speed lines coming off his shoulders and his book,
and the woman standing on a beach
studying the curve of horizon,
even the child asleep on a summer night,
speed lines flying from the posters of her bed,
from the white tips of the pillow cases,
and from the edges of her perfectly motionless body.
“More Than a Woman”
Ever since I woke up today,
a song has been playing uncontrollably
in my head—a tape looping
over the spools of the brain,
a rosary in the hands of a frenetic nun,
mad fan belt of a tune.
It must have escaped from the radio
last night on the drive home
and tunneled while I slept
from my ears to the center of my cortex.
It is a song so cloying and vapid
I won’t even bother mentioning the title,
but on it plays as if I were a turntable
covered with dancing children
and their spooky pantomimes,
as if everything I had ever learned
was being slowly replaced
by its slinky chords and the puff-balls of its lyrics.
It played while I watered the plants
and continued when I brought in the mail
and fanned out the letters on a table.
It repeated itself when I took a walk
and watched from a bridge
brown leaves floating in the channels of a current.
Late in the afternoon it seemed to fade,
but I heard it again at the restaurant
when I peered in at the lobsters
lying on the bottom of an illuminated
tank which was filled to the brim
with their copious tears.
And now at this dark window
in the middle of the night
I am beginning to think
I could be listening to music of the spheres,
the sound no one ever hears
because it has been playing forever,
only the spheres are colored pool balls,
and the music is oozing from a jukebox
whose lights I can just make out through the clouds.
Aimless Love
This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.
In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.
This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.
The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.
No lust, no slam of the door—
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.
No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor—
just a twinge every now and then
for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.
But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.
After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,
so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.
Absence
This morning as low clouds
skidded over the spires of the city
I found next to a bench
in a park an ivory chess piece—
the white knight as it turned out—
and in the pigeon-ruffling wind
I wondered where all the others were,
lined up somewhere
on their red and black squares,
many of them feeling uneasy
about the salt shaker
that was taking his place,
and all of them secretly longing
for the moment
when the white horse
would reappear out of nowhere
and advance toward the board
with his distinctive motion,
stepping forward, then sideways
before advancing again,
the same moves I was making him do
over and over in the sunny field of my palm.
Royal Aristocrat
My old typewriter used to make so much noise
I had to put a cushion of newspaper
beneath it late at night
so as not to wake the whole house.
Even if I closed the study door
and typed a few words at a time—
the best way to work anyway—
the clatter of keys was still so loud
that the gray and yellow bird
would wince in its cage.
Some nights I could even see the moon
frowning down at me through the winter trees.
That was twenty years ago,
yet as I write this with my soft lead pencil
I can still hear that distinctive sound,
like small arms fire across a border,
one burst after another
as my wife turned in her sleep.
I was a single monkey
trying to type the opening lines of my Hamlet,
often doing nothing more
than ironing pieces of paper in the platen
then wrinkling them into balls
to flick into the wicker basket.
Still, at least I was making noise,
adding to the great secretarial din,
that chorus of clacking and bells,
thousands of desks receding into the past.
And that was more than can be said
for the mute rooms of furniture,
the speechless cruets of oil and vinegar,
and the tall silent hedges surrounding the house.
Such deep silence on those nights—
just the sound of my typing
and a few stars singing a song their mother
sang when they were mere babies in the sky.
Paris
In the apartment someone gave me,
the bathroom looked out on a little garden
at the bottom of an air shaft
with a few barely sprouting trees,
ivy clinging to the white cinder blocks,
a blue metal table and a rusted chair
where, it would seem, no one had ever sat.
Every morning, a noisy bird
would flutter down between the buildings,
perch on a thin branch and yell at me
in French bird-talk
while I soaked in the tub
under the light from the pale translucent ceiling.
And while he carried on, I would lie there
in the warm soapy water