Copyright © 2016 by Billy Collins
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Original publication information for some of the poems contained within the work can be found beginning on this page.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Collins, Billy, author.
Title: The rain in Portugal : poems / Billy Collins.
Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016008639 | ISBN 9780679644064 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780399588303 (ebook)
Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / American / General. | HUMOR / Form / Limericks & Verse.
Classification: LCC PS3553.O47478 A6 2016 | DDC 811/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016008639
Ebook ISBN 9780399588303
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Christopher M. Zucker, adapted for ebook
Cover art: Charles-Antoine Coypel, Head of Potiphar’s Wife, c. 1737 (Horvitz Collection, Boston/Michael Gould)
v4.1
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
A Note to the Reader About This Poetry Ebook
Part One
1960
Lucky Cat
Only Child
The Night of the Fallen Limb
Greece
Bashō in Ireland
Not So Still Life
Cosmology
Dream Life
Hendrik Goltzius’s “Icarus” (1588)
The Money Note
Helium
Weathervane
Species
The Bard in Flight
Sirens
Predator
Traffic
Sixteen Years Old, I Help Bring in the Hay on My Uncle John’s Farm with Two French-Canadian Workers
The Present
Part Two
On Rhyme
The Five Spot, 1964
2128
Bags of Time
One Leg of the Journey
A Restaurant in Moscow
Tanager
Santorini
Bravura
Muybridge’s Lobsters
Portrait
Early Morning
Child Lost at the Beach
In Praise of Ignorance
Microscopic Pants
Many Moons
Note to J. Alfred Prufrock
Speed Walking on August 31, 2013
December 1st
Part Three
Genuflection
Thanksgiving
Under the Stars
Mister Shakespeare
The Influence of Anxiety: A Term Paper
Goats
The Day After Tomorrow
A Day in May
The Lake
Solvitur Ambulando
Fire
Bachelorette Party
Oh, Lonesome Me
Meditation
Poem to the First Generation of People to Exist After the Death of the English Language
What a Woman Said to Me After a Reading in the Napa Valley
Joy
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Billy Collins
About the Author
“For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.”
—HEMINGWAY ON RALPH DUNNING (A Moveable Feast)
A Note to the Reader About this Poetry Ebook
Lines of poetry are sacred to both the author and the reader. To alter the specific construction in line length is to alter the look and rhythm of the poem.
However, as ebooks and eReading devices have become more prevalent, readers have come to expect certain functionality, including the ability to resize the type in order to make it more legible.
We have made sure to balance both of these needs with this ebook. It does allow you to change the size of the type in order to make the poems easier to read. This may cause unintended line breaks to occur within the poems. To preserve the rhythm of the poetry when this happens, we have formatted the ebook so that any words bumped down to a new line will be indented slightly. This way you can still follow the author’s intended rhythm for the poem while reading at the type size of your choice.
1960
In the old joke,
the marriage counselor
tells the couple who never talks anymore
to go to a jazz club because at a jazz club
everyone talks during the bass solo.
But of course, no one starts talking
just because of a bass solo
or any other solo for that matter.
The quieter bass solo just reveals
the people in the club
who have been talking all along,
the same ones you can hear
on some well-known recordings.
Bill Evans, for example,
who is opening a new door into the piano
while some guy chats up his date
at one of the little tables in the back.
I have listened to that album
so many times I can anticipate the moment
of his drunken laugh
as if it were a strange note in the tune.
And so, anonymous man,
you have become part of my listening,
your romance a romance lost in the past
and a reminder somehow
that each member of that trio has died since then
and maybe so have you and, sadly, maybe she.
Lucky Cat
It’s a law as immutable as the ones
governing bodies in motion and bodies at rest
that a cat picked up will never stay
in the place where you choose to set it down.
I bet you’d be happy on the sofa
or this hassock or this knitted throw pillow
are a few examples of bets you are bound to lose.
The secret of winning, I have found,
is to never bet against the cat but on the cat
preferably with another human being
who, unlike the cat, is likely to be carrying money.
And I cannot think of a better time
to thank our cat for her obedience to that law
thus turning me into a consistent winner.
She’s a pure black one, quite impossible
to photograph and prone to disappearing
into the night or even into the thin shadows of noon.
Such an amorphous blob of blackness is she
the only way to tell she is approaching
is to notice the two little yellow circles of her eyes
then only one circle when she is walking away
with her tail raised high—something like
the lantern signals of Paul Revere,
American silversmith, galloping patriot.
Only Child
I never wished for a sibling, boy or girl.
Center of the universe,
I had the back of my parents’ car
all to myself. I could look out one window
then slide over to the other window
without any quibbling over territorial rights,
and whenever I played a game
on the floor of my bedroom, it was always my turn.
Not until my parents entered their 90s
did I long for a sister, a nurse I named Mary,
who worked in a
hospital
five minutes away from their house
and who would drop everything,
even a thermometer, whenever I called.
“Be there in a jiff” and “On my way!”
were two of her favorite expressions, and mine.
And now that the parents are dead,
I wish I could meet Mary for coffee
every now and then at that Italian place
with the blue awning where we would sit
and reminisce, even on rainy days.
I would gaze into her green eyes
and see my parents, my mother looking out
of Mary’s right eye and my father staring out of her left,
which would remind me of what an odd duck
I was as a child, a little prince and a loner,
who would break off from his gang of friends
on a Saturday and find a hedge to hide behind.
and never embarrass her by asking about
her nonexistence, and maybe we
would have another espresso and a pastry
and I would always pay the bill and walk her home.
The Night of the Fallen Limb
It sounded like a chest of drawers
being tipped over, but it turned out to be
the more likely crashing down of a limb,
and there it was crippled on the lawn
in the morning after the storm had passed.
One day you may notice a chip on a vase
or an oddly shaped cloud
or a car parked at the end of a shadowy lane,
but what I noticed that summer day
from a reading chair on the small front porch
was a sparrow who appeared out of nowhere,
as birds often do, then vanished
into the leafy interior of the fallen limb
as if it were still growing from the tree,
budding and burgeoning like all the days before.
Toward evening, two men arrived with a chainsaw
and left behind only a strewing of sawdust
and a scattering of torn leaves
before driving off in their green truck.
But earlier, I had heard chirping
issuing from inside the severed appendage
as if nothing had happened at all,
as if that bird had forever to sing her little song.
And that reminded me of the story of St. Denis,
the third-century Christian martyr,
who reacted to his own decapitation
by picking his head up from the ground,
after it tumbled to a stop, of course,
and using it to deliver to the townspeople
what turned out to be his most memorable sermon.
Greece
The ruins were taking their time falling apart,
stones that once held up other stones
now scattered on top of one another
as if many centuries had to pass
before they harkened to the call of gravity.
The few pillars still upright
had nervous looks on their faces
teetering there in the famous sunlight
which descended on the grass and the disheveled stones.
And that is precisely how the bathers appeared
after we had changed at the cliff-side hotel
and made our way down to the rocky beach—
pillars of flesh in bathing suits,
two pillars tossing a colorful ball,
one pillar lying with his arm around another,
even a tiny pillar with a pail and shovel,
all deaf to a voice as old as the surf itself.
Is not poetry a megaphone held up
to the whispering lips of death?
I wrote, before capping my pen
and charging into the waves with a shout.
Bashō in Ireland
I am like the Japanese poet
who longed to be in Kyoto
even though he was already in Kyoto.
I am not exactly like him
because I am not Japanese
and I have no idea what Kyoto is like.
But once, while walking around
the Irish town of Ballyvaughan
I caught myself longing to be in Ballyvaughan.
The sensation of being homesick
for a place that is not my home
while being right in the middle of it
was particularly strong
when I passed the hotel bar
then the fluorescent depth of a launderette,
also when I stood at the crossroads
with the road signs pointing in 3 directions
and the enormous buses making the turn.
It might have had something to do
with the nearby limestone hills
and the rain collecting on my collar,
but then again I have longed
to be with a number of people
while the two of us were sitting in a room
on an ordinary evening
without a limestone hill in sight,
thousands of miles from Kyoto
and the simple wonders of Ballyvaughan,
which reminds me
who wrote how much he enjoyed
not being able to see
his favorite mountain because of all the fog.
Not So Still Life
The halves of the cleaved-open cantaloupe
are rocking toward the violin lying on its back,
and the ruby grapes appear to be moving
a millimeter at a time
in the direction of the inkwell and the furled map,
former symbols of culture and sense.
The china cup cannot be stopped
from advancing subtly toward
the silvery trout on a brown cedar plank
for a reason no one can provide
even if you made the mistake of asking.
But that’s the way it goes
when you commit to a painting
after accepting an offering of mushrooms.
I wish that the dull grey pewter jug
were not shifting
toward the crystal bowl of lemons
and that the sunflowers
and the exposed oysters had agreed
at some point to remain in their regular places.
With the skull inching toward the pear,
and the cluster of eggs beginning to wander,
I had to reassure myself
that my mother and father were still alive,
I had a place to stay
and a couple thousand dollars in a savings account.
It was just then that a realistic orange
collided silently with a brass candlestick
in some woman’s spacious apartment
on top of one of the many hills of San Francisco.
Cosmology
I never put any stock in that image of the earth
resting on the backs of four elephants
who are standing on a giant sea turtle,
who is in turn supported by an infinite regression
of turtles disappearing into a bottomless forever.
I mean who in their right mind would?
But now that we are on the subject,
my substitute picture would have the earth
with its entire population of people and things
resting on the head of Keith Richards,
who is holding a Marlboro in one hand
and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the other.
As long as Keith keeps talking about
the influence of the blues on the Rolling Stones,
the earth will continue to spin merrily
and revolve in a timely manner around the sun.
But if he changes the subject or even pause
s
too long, it’s pretty much curtains for us all.
Unless, of course, one person somehow survives
being hurtled into the frigidity of outer space;
then we would have a movie on our hands—
but wait, there wouldn’t be any hands
to write the script or make the movie,
and no theatres either, no buttered popcorn, no giant Pepsi.
So we may as well see Keith standing
on the shoulders of the other Rolling Stones,
who are in turn standing on the shoulders of Muddy Waters,
who, were it not for that endless stack of turtles,
one on top of the other all the way down,
would find himself standing on nothing at all.
Dream Life
Whenever I have a dream about Poetry,
which is not very often
considering how much I think about her,
she appears as a seamstress
who works in the window of a tailor’s shop
in a sector of a provincial city
laden with a grey and heavy sky.
I know the place so well
I could find the dimly lit shop
without asking anyone for directions,
though the streets are mostly empty,
except when I saw a solitary man
looking in the window of a butcher’s,
his hands in the pockets of his raincoat.
Poetry works long hours
and rarely speaks to the tailor
as she bends to repair the fancy costumes
of various allegorical figures