Questions About Angels

PITT POETRY SERIES

Ed Ochester, Editor

Questions About Angels

POEMS

Billy Collins

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published 1999 by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15261

Originally published by William Morrow and Company, Inc.

Copyright © 1991, Billy Collins

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Collins, Billy.

    Questions about angels : poems / Billy Collins.

            p.      cm. — (Pitt poetry series)

    ISBN 0-8229-5698-5 (alk. paper)

    I. Title. II. Series.

PS3553.047478Q47 1999

811'.54—dc21         98-45376

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-7934-0 (electronic)

for Diane

CONTENTS

1.

American Sonnet

A History of Weather

First Reader

Student of Clouds

Candle Hat

The Death of Allegory

Reading Myself to Sleep

The Norton Anthology of English Literature

The Hunt

Forgetfulness

2.

Questions About Angels

A Wonder of the World

Mappamundi

The First Geniuses

The Afterlife

The Dead

Endangered

Going Out for Cigarettes

3.

Purity

Cliché

Field Guide

Putti in the Night

The Man in the Moon

Horseman, Pass By!

Memento Mori

The Last Man on Earth

Come Running

Modern Peasant

Instructions to the Artist

Weighing the Dog

One Life to Live

The Wires of the Night

Axiom

Vade Mecum

Not Touching

Night Sand

Love in the Sahara

Invective

4.

The Life of Riley: A Definitive Biography

Jack

Metamorphosis

Saturday Morning

Late Show

Pie Man

Wolf

The History Teacher

Pensée

The Discovery of Scat

Dog

The Willies

On Reading in the Morning Paper That Dreams May Be Only Nonsense

Rip Van Winkle

English Country House

Nostalgia

Acknowledgments

1

American Sonnet

We do not speak like Petrarch or wear a hat like Spenser

and it is not fourteen lines

like furrows in a small, carefully plowed field

but the picture postcard, a poem on vacation,

that forces us to sing our songs in little rooms

or pour our sentiments into measuring cups.

We write on the back of a waterfall or lake,

adding to the view a caption as conventional

as an Elizabethan woman's heliocentric eyes.

We locate an adjective for the weather.

We announce that we are having a wonderful time.

We express the wish that you were here

and hide the wish that we were where you are,

walking back from the mailbox, your head lowered

as you read and turn the thin message in your hands.

A slice of this place, a length of white beach,

a piazza or carved spires of a cathedral

will pierce the familiar place where you remain,

and you will toss on the table this reversible display:

a few square inches of where we have strayed

and a compression of what we feel.

A History of Weather

It is the kind of spring morning—candid sunlight

elucidating the air, a flower-ruffling breeze—

that makes me want to begin a history of weather,

a ten-volume elegy for the atmospheres of the past,

the envelopes that have moved around the moving globe.

It will open by examining the cirrus clouds

that are now sweeping over this house into the next state,

and every chapter will step backwards in time

to illustrate the rain that fell on battlefields

and the winds that attended