Praise for
Ballistics and Billy Collins
“Wryly philosophical, caustically whimsical, disarmingly beautiful, Collins’s covertly powerful lyrics deftly snare all that is fine and ludicrous about us.”
—Booklist
“Accessible and high-spirited … [Collins] again shows the deft, self-mocking touch that has made him one of America’s bestselling poets.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[Collins] gives to ‘ordinary lives’ an eloquence that is far from ordinary but made from it nevertheless.”
—The Buffalo News (Editor’s Choice)
“Collins reveals the unexpected within the ordinary. He peels back the surface of the humdrum to make the moment new.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“By careful observation, Collins spins comic gold from the dross of quotidian suburban life.… Chipping away at the surface, he surprises you by scraping to the wood underneath, to some deeper truth.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“A poet of plentitude, irony, and Augustan grace.”
—The New Yorker
“It is difficult not to be charmed by Collins, and that in itself is a remarkable literary accomplishment.”
—The New York Review of Books
“[Collins] moves you to laughter and tears, often during the course of one poem.… His insight into the human condition astonishes.”
—Pages
“Collins’s accessible and deeply human poetry would make a poetry lover out of anyone.”
—Good Housekeeping
“Collins uses ordinary words … and his sentences have the cadences of speech. They usually start with plain statements … then something strange happens. A rocket goes off, images burst out like fireworks, and life’s backyard becomes a magic kingdom.… Collins is often very funny—but more startling than the wit is the way his mind makes unexpected leaps and splices.”
—The Boston Globe
“To begin with, Collins is absolutely charming. He deserves every rose he’s flung these days.… His poems are irresistible.”
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Collins has reached into so many unexplored corners that he has elevated the mundane, not out of proportion to the world, but to a place where it seems to have always belonged.”
—The Miami Herald
“Like a master jazz trumpeter, Collins takes quirky, imaginative leaps that are as stunning for their coherence as for their originality.… Collins’s popularity hinges on the accessibility of his poems and their mildly subversive quality.… So obviously a virtuoso, Billy Collins is sure to bring many new readers to poetry.”
—The Washington Post Book World
ALSO BY BILLY COLLINS
The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems
Nine Horses
Sailing Alone Around the Room
Picnic, Lightning
The Art of Drowning
Questions About Angels
The Apple That Astonished Paris
Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (editor)
180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (editor)
2010 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2008 by Billy Collins
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Previous publication information about some of the poems contained within this work can be found beginning on this page.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2008.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Collins, Billy.
Ballistics : poems / Billy Collins.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-763-1
I. Title.
PS3553.O47478B35 2008
811′.54–dc22
www.atrandom.com
v3.1
For Chris Calhoun
advocate and pal
Even as a cow she was lovely.
—Ovid, Metamorphoses
contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Note to the Reader
August in Paris
one
Brightly Colored Boats Upturned on the Banks of the Charles
Searching
High
The Four-Moon Planet
Evasive Maneuvers
August
The Poems of Others
Aubade
No Things
The First Night
January in Paris
two
Ballistics
Pornography
Quiet
Scenes of Hell
Hippos on Holiday
Carpe Diem
Lost
Dublin
New Year’s Day
The Day Lassie Died
three
Tension
The Golden Years
Vermont, Early November
The Effort
The Lamps Unlit
China
Looking Forward
(detail)
Le Chien
Addendum
On the Death of a Next-Door Neighbor
Separation
four
Adage
The Flight of the Statues
Passivity
Ornithography
Baby Listening
Bathtub Families
Despair
The Idea of Natural History at Key West
The Fish
A Dog on His Master
The Great American Poem
What Love Does
Divorce
Liu Yung
This Little Piggy Went to Market
Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant
The Breather
Oh, My God!
The Mortal Coil
The Future
Envoy
acknowledgments
About the Author
A Note to the Reader About this Poetry eBook
The way a poem looks on the page is a vital aspect of its being. The length of its lines and the poet’s use of stanza breaks give the poem a physical shape, which guides our reading of the poem and distinguishes it from prose.
With an eBook, this distinct shape may be altered if you choose to take advantage of one of the functions of your eReader by changing the size of the type for greater legibility. Doing this may cause the poem to have line breaks not intended by the poet. To preserve the physical integrity of the poem, we have formatted the eBook so that any words that get bumped down to a new line in the poem will be noticeably indented. This way, you can still appreciate the poem’s original shape regardless of your choice of type size.
August in Paris
I have stopped here on the rue des Écoles
just off the boulevard St-Germain
to look over the shoulder of a man
in a flannel shirt and a straw hat
who has set up an easel and a canvas chair
on the sidewalk in order to paint from a droll angle
a side-view of the Church of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
But where are you, reader,
who have not paused in your walk
to look over my shoulder
to see what I am jotting in this not
ebook?
Alone in this city,
I sometimes wonder what you look like,
if you are wearing a flannel shirt
or a wraparound blue skirt held together by a pin.
But every time I turn around
you have fled through a crease in the air
to a quiet room where the shutters are closed
against the heat of the afternoon,
where there is only the sound of your breathing
and every so often, the turning of a page.
one
Brightly Colored Boats Upturned
on the Banks of the Charles
What is there to say about them
that has not been said in the title?
I saw them near dawn from a glassy room
on the other side of that river,
which flowed from some hidden spring
to the sea; but that is getting away from
the brightly colored boats upturned
on the banks of the Charles,
the sleek racing sculls of a college crew team.
red, yellow, blue and green—
is all I wanted to say about them,
although for the rest of the day
I pictured a lighter version of myself
calling time through a little megaphone,
first to the months of the year,
then to the twelve apostles, all grimacing
as they leaned and pulled on the long wooden oars.
Searching
I recall someone once admitting
that all he remembered of Anna Karenina
was something about a picnic basket,
and now, after consuming a book
devoted to the subject of Barcelona—
its people, its history, its complex architecture—
all I remember is the mention
of an albino gorilla, the inhabitant of a park
where the Citadel of the Bourbons once stood.
The sheer paleness of her looms over
all the notable names and dates
as the evening strollers stop before her
and point to show their children.
These locals called her Snowflake,
and here she has been mentioned again in print
in the hope of keeping her pallid flame alive
and helping her, despite her name, to endure
in this poem where she has found another cage.
Oh, Snowflake,
I had no interest in the capital of Catalonia—
its people, its history, its complex architecture—
no, you were the reason
I kept my light on late into the night
turning all those pages, searching for you everywhere.
High
On that clear October morning,
I was only behind a double espresso
and a single hit of anti-depressant,
yet there, on the shore of the reservoir
with its flipped-over rowboats,
I felt like I was walking with Jane Austen
to borrow the jargon of the streets.
Yes, I was wearing the crown,
as the drug addicts like to say,
knitting a bonnet for Charlie,
entertaining the troops,
sitting in the study with H. G. Wells—
so many ways to express that mood
of royal goodwill
when the gift of sight is cause enough for jubilation.
And later in the afternoon
when I finally came down,
a lexicon was waiting for me there, too.
In my upholstered chair by a window
with dusk pouring into the room,
I appeared to be doing nothing,
but inside I was busy riding the marble,
as the lurkers like to put it,
talking to Marco Polo,
juggling turtles,
going through the spin cycle,
or—my favorite, if I had to have one—out of milk.
The Four-Moon Planet
I have envied the four-moon planet.
—The Notebooks of Robert Frost
Maybe he was thinking of the song
“What a Little Moonlight Can Do”
and became curious about
what a lot of moonlight might be capable of.
But wouldn’t this be too much of a good thing?
and what if you couldn’t tell them apart
and they always rose together
like pale quadruplets entering a living room?
Yes, there would be enough light
to read a book or write a letter at midnight,
and if you drank enough tequila
you might see eight of them roving brightly above.
But think of the two lovers on a beach,
his arm around her bare shoulder,
thrilled at how close they were feeling tonight
while he gazed at one moon and she another.
Evasive Maneuvers
I grew up hiding from the other children.
I would break off from the pack
on its patrol of the streets every Saturday
and end up alone behind a hedge
or down a dim hallway in a strange basement.
No one ever came looking for me,
which only added to the excitement.
I used to hide from adults, too,
mostly behind my mother’s long coat
or her floral dress depending on the season.
I tried to learn how to walk
between my father’s steps while he walked
like the trick poodle I had seen on television.
And I hid behind books,
usually one of the volumes of the encyclopedia
that was kept behind glass in a bookcase,
the letters of the alphabet in gold.
Before I knew how to read,
I sat in an armchair in the living room
and turned the pages, without a clue
about the worlds that were pressed
between D and F, M and O, W and Z.
Maybe this explains why
I looked out the bedroom window
first thing this morning
at the heavy trees, low gray clouds,
and said the word gastropod out loud,
and having no idea what it meant
went downstairs and looked it up
then hid in the woods from my wife and our dog.
August
The first one to rise on a Sunday morning,
I enter the white bathroom
trying not to think of Christ or Wallace Stevens.
It’s before dawn and the road is quiet,
even the birds are silent in the heat.
And standing on the tile floor,
I open a little nut of time
and nod to the cold water faucet,
with its chilled beaded surface
for cooling my wrists and cleansing my face,
and I offer some thanks
to the electricity swirling in the lightbulbs
for showing me the toothbrush and the bottle of aspirin.
I went to grammar school for Jesus
and to graduate school for Wallace Stevens.
But right now, I want to consider
only the water and the light,
always ready to flow and spark at my touch,
and beyond the wonders of this white room—
the reservoir high in the mountains,
the shore crowded with trees,
and the dynamo housed in a colossus of brick,
its bright interior, and up there,
a workman smoking alone on a catwalk.
The Poems of Others
Is there no end to it
the way they keep popping up in magazines
then congregate in the
drafty orphanage of a book?
You would think the elm would speak up,
but like the dawn it only inspires—then more of them appear.
Not even the government can put a stop to it.
Just this morning, one approached me like a possum,
snout twitching, impossible to ignore.
Another looked out of the water at me like an otter.
How can anyone dismiss them
when they dangle from the eaves of houses
and throw themselves in our paths?
Perhaps I am being harsh, even ridiculous.
It could have been the day at the zoo
that put me this way—all the children by the cages—
as if only my poems had the right to exist
and people would come down from the hills
in the evening to view them in rooms of white marble.
So I will take the advice of the mentors
and put this in a drawer for a week
maybe even a year or two and then have a calmer look at it—
but for now I am going to take a walk
through this nearly silent neighborhood
that is my winter resting place, my hibernaculum,
and get my mind off the poems of others
even as they peer down from the trees