PITT POETRY SERIES
Ed Ochester, Editor
PICNIC, LIGHTNING
Billy Collins
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
The publication of this book is supported by a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15261
Copyright © 1998, Billy Collins
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLI CATION DATA
Collins, Billy.
Picnic, lightning / Billy Collins.
p. cm.— (Pitt poetry series)
ISBN 0-8229-4066-3 (acid-free paper).—
ISBN 0-8229-5970-5 (pbk. : acid-free paper).
I Title. II. Series.
PS3553.047478P52 1998
811'. 54—dc21 97–33955
ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-9105-2 (electronic)
To the memory of Katherine Collins (1901–1997)
Contents
A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal
I
Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now
I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of “Three Blind Mice”
Afternoon with Irish Cows
Marginalia
What I Learned Today
Journal
Some Days
Silence
Picnic, Lightning
II
In the Room of a Thousand Miles
Morning
Bonsai
Splitting Wood
Shoveling Snow with Buddha
I Go Back to the House for a Book
After the Storm
Snow
Moon
Looking West
This Much I Do Remember
Japan
III
Victoria's Secret
Musée des Beaux Art Revisited
Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey
Paradelle for Susan
Duck/Rabbit
Egypt
Home Again
Lines Lost Among Trees
The Many Faces of Jazz
Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes
IV
The Night House
The Death of the Hat
The List of Ancient Pastimes
Passengers
Serpentine
Reincarnation and You
Jazz and Nature
And His Sextet
Where I Live
My Life
Aristotle
Acknowledgments
PICNIC, LIGHTNING
“We spend our life trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench.”
Beckett, Texts for Nothing
A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal
“A poet…never speaks directly,
as to someone at the breakfast table.”
—Yeats
Every morning I sit across from you
at the same small table,
the sun all over the breakfast things—
curve of a blue-and-white pitcher,
a dish of berries—
me in a sweatshirt or robe,
you invisible.
Most days, we are suspended
over a deep pool of silence.
I stare straight through you
or look out the window at the garden,
the powerful sky,
a cloud passing behind a tree.
There is no need to pass the toast,
or pour you a cup of tea,
and I can hide behind the paper,
rotate in its drum of calamitous news.
But some days I may notice
a little door swinging open
in the morning air,
and maybe the tea leaves
of some dream will be stuck
to the china slope of the hour—
then I will lean forward,
elbows on the table,
with something to tell you,
and you will look up, as always,
your spoon dripping milk, ready to listen.
I
Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.
Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure—
of fishing on the Susquehanna.
I am more likely to be found
in a quiet room like this one—
a painting of a woman on the wall,
a bowl of tangerines on the table—
trying to manufacture the sensation
of fishing on the Susquehanna.
There is little doubt
that others have been fishing
on the Susquehanna,
rowing upstream in a wooden boat,
sliding the oars under the water
then raising them to drip in the light.
But the nearest I have ever come to
fishing on the Susquehanna
was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia
when I balanced a little egg of time
in front of a painting
in which that river curled around a bend
under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,
dense trees along the banks,
and a fellow with a red bandanna
sitting in a small, green
flat-bottom boat
holding the thin whip of a pole.
That is something I am unlikely
ever to do, I remember
saying to myself and the person next to me.
Then I blinked and moved on
to other American scenes
of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,
even one of a brown hare
who seemed so wired with alertness
I imagined him springing right out of the frame.
To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now
“I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now.”
Mary Oliver
Nobody here likes a wet dog.
No one wants anything to do with a dog
that is wet from being out in the rain
or retrieving a stick from a lake.
Look how she wanders around the crowded pub tonight
going from one person to another
hoping for a pat on the head, a rub behind the ears,
something that could be given with one hand
without even wrinkling the conversation.
But everyone pushes her away,
some with a knee, others with the sole of a boot.
Even the children, who don't realize she is wet
until they go to pet her,
push her away
then wipe their hands on their clothes.
And whenever she heads toward me,
I show her my palm, and she turns aside.
O stranger of the future!
O inconceivable being!
whatever the shape of your house,
however you scoot from place to place,
no matter how strange and colorless the clothes you may wear,
I bet nobody there likes a wet dog either.
I bet everybody in
your pub,
even the children, pushes her away.
I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of “Three Blind Mice”
And I start wondering how they came to be blind.
If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sisters,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.
Or was it a common accident, all three caught
in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?
If not,
if each came to his or her blindness separately,
how did they ever manage to find one another?
Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse
let alone two other blind ones?
And how, in their tiny darkness,
could they possibly have run after a farmer's wife
or anyone else's wife for that matter?
Not to mention why.
Just so she could cut off their tails
with a carving knife, is the cynic's answer,
but the thought of them without eyes
and now without tails to trail through the moist grass
or slip around the corner of a baseboard
has the cynic who always lounges within me
up off his couch and at the window
trying to hide the rising softness that he feels.
By now I am on to dicing an onion
which might account for the wet stinging
in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard's
mournful trumpet on “Blue Moon,”
which happens to be the next cut,
cannot be said to be making matters any better.
Afternoon with Irish Cows
There were a few dozen who occupied the field
across the road from where we lived,
stepping all day from tuft to tuft,
their big heads down in the soft grass,
though I would sometimes pass a window
and look out to see the field suddenly empty
as if they had taken wing, flown off to another county.
Then later, I would open the blue front door,
and again the field would be full of their munching,
or they would be lying down
on the black and white maps of their sides,
facing in all directions, waiting for rain.
How mysterious, how patient and dumbfounded
they appeared in the long quiet of the afternoons.
But every once in a while, one of them
would let out a sound so phenomenal
that I would put down the paper
or the knife I was cutting an apple with
and walk across the road to the stone wall
to see which one of them was being torched
or pierced through the side with a long spear.
Yes, it sounded like pain until I could see
the noisy one, anchored there on all fours,
her neck outstretched, her bellowing head
laboring upward as she gave voice
to the rising, full-bodied cry
that began in the darkness of her belly
and echoed up through her bowed ribs into her gaping mouth.
Then I knew that she was only announcing
the large, unadulterated cowness of herself,
pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind
to all the green fields and the gray clouds,
to the limestone hills and the inlet of the blue bay,
while she regarded my head and shoulders
above the wall with one wild, shocking eye.
Marginalia
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive—
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!”—
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote “Don't be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull's-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page—
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
a few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil—
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet—
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”
What I Learned Today
I had never heard of John Bernard Flannagan,
American sculptor,
until I found him on page 961
of the single-volume encyclopedia I am reading
at the rate of one page each day.
He was so poor, according to the entry,
he could not afford the good, quarried marble
and instead had to carve animals
out of the fieldstones he gathered
until he committed suicide in 1942,
the year, I can't help thinking, I turned one.
Of course I know what flannel is,
but that French flannel is napped on only one side
is new to me and a reminder that
no matter what the size the aquarium of one's learning,
another colored pebble can always be dropped in.
Tonight a fog blows by the windows,
and a mist falls throug
h the porch lights
as my index finger descends from flat-coated retriever,
to flatfish, those sideways creatures—
turbot, plaice, flounder, sole—
all swimming through the dark with close-set eyes,
toothless, twisted mouths,
and a preference for warm, shallow water.
But this is nothing new to me.
No dots are connected in the vast grid
of my autodidacticism.
No branch is pruned in the forest of my ignorance,
which is why I am stepping over the Flathead River
of Canada and Montana's Flathead Lake
and coming to rest on the Flathead Indians
who never actually practiced head-flattening,
I am disappointed to learn,
but got their name from neighboring tribes
who shaped the fronts of their own heads
to achieve a pointed appearance,
which is how I hope to look
when the entire contents of this book
press against the inside of my high forehead.
What a relief to emerge
from all this flatheadedness and land on
Flaubert, son of a surgeon, victim of a nervous
disorder, and pursuer of le mot juste.
Yet the entry for the supreme master of the realistic novel
is no taller than a filtered cigarette
and hardly half the size of the piscatory word-puff
that envelops the subject of flatfish.
Posterity is, indeed, a cruel and savagely attired mistress,
but my own slow, sentimental education
must continue with the revelation
that while there were three emperors and
a Catholic patriarch all named Flavian,
there is only one Dan Flavin, another sculptor,
who works, the bottom of the narrow column tells me,
in the medium of fluorescent lights,
luminous tubes, strangely configured.
The hour is late as I mark my place
with a playing card and close the book in my lap.
A cool vapor flows over the windowsills.
Appalachia is behind me, Napoleon lies ahead,
and I will save for tomorrow the subject of flax
(the chief source of fiber and seed oil
from prehistoric times to the development of cotton).
It is time to float on the waters of the night.
Time to wrap my arms around this book
and press it to my chest, life preserver
in a sea of unremarkable men and women,