poems by Billy Collins

BUDAPEST
by Billy Collins

My pen moves along the page

like the snout of a strange animal
shaped like a human arm
and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater

I watch it sniffing the paper ceaselessly

intent as any forager that has nothing on its mind
but the grubs and insects
that will allow it to live another day

It wants only to be here tomorrow

dressed, perhaps, in the sleeve of a plaid shirt
nose pressed against the page
writing a few more dutyful lines

while I gaze out the window

and imagine Budapest
or some other city
where I have never been

Some Days
by Billy Collins

Some days I put the people in their places at the table,

bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,

the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days, I am the one

who is lifted up by the ribs,
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it
striding around like a vivid god,
your shoulders in the clouds,
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

Forgetfulness
by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go

followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,

the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,

it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river

whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night

to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

The Country
by Billy Collins

I wondered about you

when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.

But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?

Who could whisk away the thought
of one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper

gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,

the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time-

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer

in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation

the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?

The Dead
by Billy Collins

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,

while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,

and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a long afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent

and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl

by Billy Collins

Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon

on the day you were born,
you would be all done in only one more year?
Of course, you couldn’t have done that all alone.
So never mind;
you’re fine just being yourself.
You’re loved for just being you.

But did you know that at your age

Judy Garland was pulling down 150,000 dollars a picture,
Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory
and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room –
no wait, I mean he had invented the calculator?

Of course, there will be time for all that

later in your life, after you come out of your room
and begin to blossom,
or at least pick up all your socks.

For some reason I keep remembering

that Lady Jane Grey was queen of England
when she was only 15.
But then she was beheaded, so never mind her as a role model.

A few centuries later,

when he was your age,
Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family,
but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies, four operas
and two complete masses as a youngster.

But of course, that was in Austria

at the height of Romantic lyricism,
not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.

Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15

or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?
We think you’re special just being you –
playing with your food and staring into space.

By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,

but that doesn’t mean he never helped out around the house.

Embrace
by Billy Collins

You know the parlor trick.

wrap your arms around your own body
and from the back it looks like
someone is embracing you
her hands grasping your shirt
her fingernails teasing your neck
from the front it is another story
you never looked so alone
your crossed elbows and screwy grin
you could be waiting for a tailor
to fit you with a straight jacket
one that would hold you really tight.
Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes
by Billy Collins

First, her tippet made of tulle,

easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,

the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a more

complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer’s dividing water,
and slip inside.

You will want to know

that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women’s undergarments

in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook

it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything -
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is

it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale

when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,

the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that reason is a plank,
that life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.
Nightclub
by Billy Collins

You are so beautiful and I am a fool

to be in love with you
is a theme that keeps coming up
in songs and poems.
There seems to be no room for variation.
I have never heard anyone sing
I am so beautiful
and you are a fool to be in love with me,
even though this notion has surely
crossed the minds of women and men alike.
You are so beautiful, too bad you are a fool
is another one you don't hear.
Or, you are a fool to consider me beautiful.
That one you will never hear, guaranteed.

For no particular reason this afternoon

I am listening to Johnny Hartman
whose dark voice can curl around
the concepts on love, beauty, and foolishness
like no one else's can.
It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette
someone left burning on a baby grand piano
around three o'clock in the morning;
smoke that billows up into the bright lights
while out there in the darkness
some of the beautiful fools have gathered
around little tables to listen,
some with their eyes closed,
others leaning forward into the music
as if it were holding them up,
or twirling the loose ice in a glass,
slipping by degrees into a rhythmic dream.

Yes, there is all this foolish beauty,

borne beyond midnight,
that has no desire to go home,
especially now when everyone in the room
is watching the large man with the tenor sax
that hangs from his neck like a golden fish.
He moves forward to the edge of the stage
and hands the instrument down to me
and nods that I should play.
So I put the mouthpiece to my lips
and blow into it with all my living breath.
We are all so foolish,
my long bebop solo begins by saying,
so damn foolish
we have become beautiful without even knowing it.

Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

Litany
by Billy Collins

You are the bread and the knife,

The crystal goblet and the wine...
-Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,

the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,

the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,

maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show

that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,

speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,

the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees

and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House

by Billy Collins

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.

He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.

I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,

his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,

sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful

silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

By A Swimming Pool Outside Syracusa

by Billy Collins

All afternoon I have been struggling to communicate in Italian with

Roberto and Giuseppe, who have begun to resemble the two male
characters in my Italian for Beginners, the ones who are always
shopping or inquiring about the times of trains, and now I can hardly
speak or write English.

Candle Hat
by Billy Collins

In most self-portraits it is the face that dominates:

Cezanne is a pair of eyes swimming in brushstrokes,
Van Gogh stares out of a halo of swirling darkness,
Rembrant looks relieved as if he were taking a breather
from painting The Blinding of Sampson.

But in this one Goya stands well back from the mirror
and is seen posed in the clutter of his studio
addressing a canvas tilted back on a tall easel.

He appears to be smiling out at us as if he knew

we would be amused by the extraordinary hat on his head
which is fitted around the brim with candle holders,
a device that allowed him to work into the night.

You can only wonder what it would be like

to be wearing such a chandelier on your head
as if you were a walking dining room or concert hall.

But once you see this hat there is no need to read

any biography of Goya or to memorize his dates.

To understand Goya you only have to imagine him

lighting the candles one by one, then placing
the hat on his head, ready for a night of work.

Imagine him surprising his wife with his new invention,

the laughing like a birthday cake when she saw the glow.

Imagine him flickering through the rooms of his house

with all the shadows flying across the walls.

Imagine a lost traveler knocking on his door

one dark night in the hill country of Spain.
"Come in, " he would say, "I was just painting myself,"
as he stood in the doorway holding up the wand of a brush,
illuminated in the blaze of his famous candle hat.

Child Development
by Billy Collins

As sure as prehistoric fish grew legs

and sauntered off the beaches into forests
working up some irregular verbs for their
first conversation, so three-year-old children
enter the phase of name-calling.

Every day a new one arrives and is added

to the repertoire. You Dumb Goopyhead,
You Big Sewerface, You Poop-on-the-Floor
(a kind of Navaho ring to that one)
they yell from knee level, their little mugs
flushed with challenge.
Nothing Samuel Johnson would bother tossing out
in a pub, but then the toddlers are not trying
to devastate some fatuous Enlightenment hack.

They are just tormenting their fellow squirts

or going after the attention of the giants
way up there with their cocktails and bad breath
talking baritone nonsense to other giants,
waiting to call them names after thanking
them for the lovely party and hearing the door close.

The mature save their hothead invective

for things: an errant hammer, tire chains,
or receding trains missed by seconds,
though they know in their adult hearts,
even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed
for his appalling behavior,
that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,
their wives are Dopey Dopeheads
and that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants.

Consolation
by Billy Collins

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,

wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous

domes and there is no need to memorize a succession
of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.

How much better to command the simple precinct of home

than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyes camera
eager to eat the world one monument at a time?

Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice,

I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning
paper, all language barriers down,
rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.

And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone

willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car

as if it were the great car of English itself

and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off
down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.

Dear Reader
by Billy Collins

Baudelaire considers you his brother, and Fielding calls out to you
every few paragraphs as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again, attentive ghost, dark silent
figure standing in the doorway of these words.

Fishing On The Susquehanna In July

by Billy Collins

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 bandana

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.

Flames
by Billy Collins

Smokey the Bear heads

into the autumn woods
with a red can of gasoline
and a box of wooden matches.

His ranger's hat is cocked

at a disturbing angle.

His brown fur gleams

under the high sun
as his paws, the size
of catcher's mitts,
crackle into the distance.

He is sick of dispensing
warnings to the careless,
the half-wit camper,
the dumbbell hiker.

He is going to show them

how a professional does it.

For Bartleby The Scrivener

by Billy Collins

"Every time we get a big gale around here

some people just refuse to batten down."

we estimate that

ice skating into a sixty

mile an hour wind, fully exerting
the legs and swinging arms

you will be pushed backward

an inch every twenty minutes.

in a few days, depending on

the size of the lake,
the backs of your skates
will touch land.

you will then fall on your ass

and be blown into the forest.
if you gather enough speed
by flapping your arms
and keeping your skates pointed

you will catch up to other

flying people who refused to batten down.
you will exchange knowing waves
as you ride the great wind north.

I Ask You
by Billy Collins

What scene would I want to be enveloped in

more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?

It gives me time to think

about all that is going on outside--
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.

But beyond this table

there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.

No, it's all here,

the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles--
each a different height--
are singing in perfect harmony.

So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt--
frog at the edge of a pond--
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.

I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakey's Version Of

"Three Blind Mice"
by Billy Collins
And I start wondering how they came to be blind.
If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister,
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
to locate even one fellow mouse with vision
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.

I Go Back To The House For A Book

by Billy Collins

I turn around on the gravel and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor's office, and while I am inside,
running the finger of inquisition along a shelf, another me that did
not bother to go back to the house for a book heads out on his own,
rolls down the driveway, and swings left toward town, a ghost in his
ghost car, another knot in the string of time, a good three minutes
ahead of me — a spacing that will now continue for the rest of my
life.

Invention
by Billy Collins

Tonight the moon is a cracker,

with a bite out of it
floating in the night,

and in a week or so
according to the calendar
it will probably look

like a silver football,

and nine, maybe ten days ago
it reminded me of a thin bright claw.

But eventually --
by the end of the month,
I reckon --

it will waste away

to nothing,
nothing but stars in the sky,

and I will have a few nights

to myself,
a little time to rest my jittery pen.

Japan
by Billy Collins

Today I pass the time reading

a favorite haiku,
saying the few words over and over.

It feels like eating

the same small, perfect grape
again and again.

I walk through the house reciting it

and leave its letters falling
through the air of every room.

I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.

I say it in front of a painting of the sea.
I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.

I listen to myself saying it,

then I say it without listening,
then I hear it without saying it.

And when the dog looks up at me,

I kneel down on the floor
and whisper it into each of his long white ears.

It's the one about the one-ton temple bell

with the moth sleeping on its surface,

and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating

pressure of the moth
on the surface of the iron bell.

When I say it at the window,

the bell is the world
and I am the moth resting there.

When I say it at the mirror,

I am the heavy bell
and the moth is life with its papery wings.

And later, when I say it to you in the dark,

you are the bell,
and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,

and the moth has flown

from its line
and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.

Madmen
by Billy Collins

They say you can jinx a poem

if you talk about it before it is done.
If you let it out too early, they warn,
your poem will fly away,
and this time they are absolutely right.

Take the night I mentioned to you

I wanted to write about the madmen,
as the newspapers so blithely call them,
who attack art, not in reviews,
but with breadknives and hammers
in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.

Actually, they are the real artists,

you said, spinning the ice in your glass.
The screwdriver is their brush.
The real vandals are the restorers,
you went on, slowly turning me upside-down,
the ones in the white doctor's smocks
who close the wound in the landscape,
and thus ruin the true art of the mad.

I watched my poem fly down to the front

of the bar and hover there
until the next customer walked in--
then I watched it fly out the open door into the night
and sail away, I could only imagine,
over the dark tenements of the city.

All I had wished to say

was that art was also short,
as a razor can teach with a slash or two,
that it only seems long compared to life,
but that night, I drove home alone
with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart
except the faint hope that I might
catch a glimpse of the thing
in the fan of my headlights,
maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp,
poor unwritten bird, its wings folded,
staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.
Man Listening To Disc
by Billy Collins

This is not bad --

ambling along 44th Street
with Sonny Rollins for company,
his music flowing through the soft calipers
of these earphones,

as if he were right beside me

on this clear day in March,
the pavement sparkling with sunlight,
pigeons fluttering off the curb,
nodding over a profusion of bread crumbs.

In fact, I would say

my delight at being suffused
with phrases from his saxophone --
some like honey, some like vinegar --
is surpassed only by my gratitude

to Tommy Potter for taking the time

to join us on this breezy afternoon
with his most unwieldy bass
and to the esteemed Arthur Taylor
who is somehow managing to navigate

this crowd with his cumbersome drums.

And I bow deeply to Thelonious Monk
for figuring out a way
to motorize -- or whatever -- his huge piano
so he could be with us today.

This music is loud yet so confidential.

I cannot help feeling even more
like the center of the universe
than usual as I walk along to a rapid
little version of "The Way You Look Tonight,"

and all I can say to my fellow pedestrians,

to the woman in the white sweater,
the man in the tan raincoat and the heavy glasses,
who mistake themselves for the center of the universe --
all I can say is watch your step,

because the five of us, instruments and all,

are about to angle over
to the south side of the street
and then, in our own tightly knit way,
turn the corner at Sixth Avenue.

And if any of you are curious

about where this aggregation,
this whole battery-powered crew,
is headed, let us just say
that the real center of the universe,

the only true point of view,

is full of hope that he,
the hub of the cosmos
with his hair blown sideways,
will eventually make it all the way downtown.

Hunger
by Billy Collins

The fox you lug over your shoulder

in a dark sack
has cut a hole with a knife
and escaped.

The sudden lightness makes you think

you are stronger
as you walk back to your small cottage
through a forest that covers the world.

Walking Across The Atlantic

by Billy Collins

I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach

before stepping onto the first wave.

Soon I am walking across the Atlantic

thinking about Spain,
checking for whales, waterspouts.
I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.
Tonight I will sleep on its rocking surface.

But for now I try to imagine what

this must look like to the fish below,
the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing.