washing my neck, rubbing my sides,
the soap slithering down the chest and stomach,
eyes still shut as I picture in China
a light boat crossing a lake
and a wooden house on the shore
where a young woman in a tight-fitting silk dress
lifts a cup of cinnamon tea
to her painted, slightly parted lips.
The Trouble with Poetry
The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night—
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky—
the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.
And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,
and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.
Poetry fills me with joy
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.
But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.
And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.
And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti—
to be perfectly honest for a moment—
the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.
Silence
There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a motionless player on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.
The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.
The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.
The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.
And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night
like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following periodicals, where these poems first appeared, some in slightly different versions:
The American Scholar: “Boy Shooting at a Statue”
Atlanta Review: “Bereft,” “The Drive,” “The Introduction”
The Atlantic Monthly: “The Peasants’ Revolt”
Bat City Review: “The Student”
Boulevard: “Breathless,” “Eastern Standard Time,” “The Flying Notebook”
The Cortland Review: “I Ask You”
Field: “Silence,” “You, Reader”
Five Points: “Care and Feeding,” “Carry,” “The Lanyard,” “The Order of the Day,” “The Revenant”
The Gettysburg Review: “Special Glasses,” “Theme”
Hotel Amerika: “Evening Alone,” “Monday”
Living Forge: “See No Evil”
London Review of Books: “Building with Its Face Blown Off”
The Massachusetts Review: “Flock”
Michigan Quarterly Review: “Constellations”
Mississippi Review: “Drawing Class”
New Delta Review: “In the Evening”
The New Yorker: “Statues in the Park”
Nightsun: “The Trouble with Poetry”
Oxford American: “Fool Me Good”
The Paris Review: “Freud”
Poetry: “Boyhood,” “Genius,” “The Long Day,” “In the Moment,” “Silence,” “Traveling Alone”
Van Gogh’s Ear: “Height”
Washington Square Review: “Class Picture, 1954”
Western Humanities Review: “On Not Finding You at Home”
“The Centrifuge” was selected by Lyn Hejinian for The Best American Poetry: 2004, series ed. David Lehman (New York: Scribners, 2004).
Thanks also to Gina Centrello, Dan Menaker, Julia Cheiffetz, and Jynne Martin of Random House, for their support and guidance; to Chris Calhoun, for his friendship and exuberant representation; and to Diane, my true in-house editor.
BILLY COLLINS is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Nine Horses; Sailing Alone Around the Room; Picnic, Lightning; The Art of Drowning; and Questions About Angels. He is also the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. A Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and is currently serving as the Poet Laureate of New York State.