Ballistics

Billy Collins is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Trouble with Poetry, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. 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 Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and Poet Laureate of New York State from 2004 to 2006.


From the Hardcover edition.

Chapter One



Brightly Colored Boats Upturned

on the Banks of the Charles

What is there to say about them

that has not been said in the title?

I saw them near dawn from a glassy room

on the other side of that river,

which flowed from some hidden spring

to the sea; but that is getting away from

the brightly colored boats upturned

on the banks of the Charles,

the sleek racing sculls of a college crew team.



They were beautiful in the clear early light—

red, yellow, blue and green—

is all I wanted to say about them,

although for the rest of the day

I pictured a lighter version of myself

calling time through a little megaphone,

first to the months of the year,

then to the twelve apostles, all grimacing

as they leaned and pulled on the long wooden oars.

Searching

I recall someone once admitting

that all he remembered of Anna Karenina

was something about a picnic basket,



and now, after consuming a book

devoted to the subject of Barcelona—

its people, its history, its complex architecture—



all I remember is the mention

of an albino gorilla, the inhabitant of a park

where the Citadel of the Bourbons once stood.



The sheer paleness of her looms over

all the notable names and dates

as the evening strollers stop before her



and point to show their children.

These locals called her Snowflake,

and here she has been mentioned again in print



in the hope of keeping her pallid flame alive

and helping her, despite her name, to endure

in this poem where she has found another cage.



Oh, Snowflake,

I had no interest in the capital of Catalonia—

its people, its history, its complex architecture—



no, you were the reason

I kept my light on late into the night

turning all those pages, searching for you everywhere.

High

On that clear October morning,

I was only behind a double espresso

and a single hit of anti-depressant,



yet there, on the shore of the reservoir

with its flipped-over rowboats,

I felt like I was walking with Jane Austen



to borrow the jargon of the streets.

Yes, I was wearing the crown,

as the drug addicts like to say,



knitting a bonnet for Charlie,

entertaining the troops,

sitting in the study with H. G. Wells—



so many ways to express that mood

of royal goodwill

when the gift of sight is cause enough for jubilation.



And later in the afternoon

when I finally came down,

a lexicon was waiting for me there, too.



In my upholstered chair by a window

with dusk pouring into the room,

I appeared to be doing nothing,



but inside I was busy riding the marble,

as the lurkers like to put it,

talking to Marco Polo,



juggling turtles,

going through the spin cycle,

or—my favorite, if I had to have one—out of milk.

The Four-Moon Planet

I have envied the four-moon planet.

—The Notebooks of Robert Frost







Maybe he was thinking of the song

“What a Little Moonlight Can Do”

and became curious about

what a lot of moonlight might be capable of.



But wouldn’t this be too much of a good thing?

and what if you couldn’t tell them apart

and they always rose together

like pale quadruplets entering a living room?



Yes, there would be enough light

to read a book or write a letter at midnight,

and if you drank enough tequila

you might see eight of them roving brightly above.



But think of the two lovers on a beach,

his arm around her bare shoulder,

thrilled at how close they were feeling tonight

while he gazed at one moon and she another.

Evasive Maneuvers

I grew up hiding from the other children.

I would break off from the pack

on its patrol of the streets every Saturday



and end up alone behind a hedge

or down a dim hallway in a strange basement.

No one ever came looking for me,

which only added to the excitement.



I used to hide from adults, too,

mostly behind my mother’s long coat

or her floral dress depending on the season.



I tried to learn how to walk

between my father’s steps while he walked

like the trick poodle I had seen on television.



And I hid behind books,

usually one of the volumes of the encyclopedia

that was kept behind glass in a bookcase,

the letters of the alphabet in gold.



Before I knew how to read,

I sat in an armchair in the living room

and turned the pages, without a clue



about the worlds that were pressed

between D and F, M and O, W and Z.



Maybe this explains why

I looked out the bedroom window

first thing this morning

at the heavy trees, low gray clouds,



and said the word gastropod out loud,

and having no idea what it meant

went downstairs and looked it up

then hid in the woods from my wife and our dog.

August

The first one to rise on a Sunday morning,

I enter the white bathroom

trying not to think of Christ or Wallace Stevens.



It’s before dawn and the road is quiet,

even the birds are silent in the heat.

And standing on the tile floor,



I open a little nut of time

and nod to the cold water faucet,

with its chilled beaded surface



for cooling my wrists and cleansing my face,

and I offer some thanks

to the electricity swirling in the lightbulbs



for showing me the toothbrush and the bottle of aspirin.

I went to grammar school for Jesus

and to graduate school for Wallace Stevens.



But right now, I want to consider

only the water and the light,

always ready to flow and spark at my touch,

and beyond the wonders of this white room—

the reservoir high in the mountains,

the shore crowded with trees,



and the dynamo housed in a colossus of brick,

its bright interior, and up there,

a workman smoking alone on a catwalk.

Aubade

If I lived across the street from myself

and I was sitting in the dark

on the edge of the bed

at five o’clock in the morning,



I might be wondering what the light

was doing on in my study at this hour,

yet here I am at my desk

in the study wondering the very same thing.



I know I did not have to rise so early

to cut open with a penknife

the bundles of papers at a newsstand

as the man across the street might be thinking.



Clearly, I am not a farmer or a milkman.

And I am not the man across the street

who sits in the dark because sleep

is his mother and he is one of her many orphans.



Maybe I am awake just to listen

to the faint, high-pitched ringing

of tungsten in the single lightbulb

which sounds like the rustling of trees.

Or is it my job simply to sit as still

as the glass of water on the night table

of the man across the street,

as still as the photograph of my wife in a frame?



But there’s the first bird to deliver his call,

and there’s the reason I am up—

to catch the three-note song of that bird

and now to wait with him for some reply.

No Things

This love for the petty things,

part natural from the slow eye of childhood,

part a literary affectation,



this attention to the morning flower

and later in the day to a fly

strolling along the rim of a wineglass—



are we just avoiding the one true destiny,

when we do that? averting our eyes from

Philip Larkin who waits for us in an undertaker’s coat?



The leafless branches against the sky

will not save anyone from the infinity of death,

nor will the sugar bowl or the sugar spoon on the table.



So why bother with the checkerboard lighthouse?

Why waste time on the sparrow,

or the wildflowers along the roadside



when we should all be alone in our rooms

throwing ourselves against the wall of life

and the opposite wall of death,



the door locked behind us

as we hurl ourselves at the question of meaning,

and the enigma of our origins?



What good is the firefly,

the droplet running along the green leaf,

or even the bar of soap spinning around the bathtub



when ultimately we are meant to be

banging away on the mystery

as hard as we can and to hell with the neighbors?



banging away on nothingness itself,

some with their foreheads,

others with the maul of sense, the raised jawbone of poetry.

The First Night

The worst thing about death must be the first night.

—Juan Ramón Jiménez





Before I opened you, Jiménez,

it never occurred to me that day and night

would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,



but now you have me wondering

if there will also be a sun and a moon

and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set



then repair, each soul alone,

to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.

Or will the first night be the only night,



a darkness for which we have no other name?

How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,

how impossible to write it down.



This is where language will stop,

the horse we have ridden all our lives

rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.



The word that was in the beginning

and the word that was made flesh—

those and all the other words will cease.



Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,

how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?

But it is enough to frighten me



into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon,

to sunlight bright on water

or fragmented in a grove of trees,



and to look more closely here at these small leaves,

these sentinel thorns,

whose employment it is to guard the rose.

January in Paris

Poems are never completed—they are only abandoned.

—Paul Valéry



That winter I had nothing to do

but tend the kettle in my shuttered room

on the top floor of a pensione near a cemetery,



but I would sometimes descend the stairs,

unlock my bicycle, and pedal along the cold city streets

often turning from a wide boulevard

down a narrow side street

bearing the name of an obscure patriot.



I followed a few private rules,

never crossing a bridge without stopping

mid-point to lean my bike on the railing

and observe the flow of the river below

as I tried to better understand the French.



In my pale coat and my Basque cap

I pedaled past the windows of a patisserie

or sat up tall in the seat, arms folded,

and clicked downhill filling my nose with winter air.



I would see beggars and street cleaners

in their bright uniforms, and sometimes

I would see the poems of Valéry,

the ones he never finished but abandoned,

wandering the streets of the city half-clothed.



Most of them needed only a final line

or two, a little verbal flourish at the end,

but whenever I approached,

they would retreat from their makeshift fires

into the shadows—thin specters of incompletion,



forsaken for so many long decades

how could they ever trust another man with a pen?



I came across the one I wanted to tell you about

sitting with a glass of rosé at a café table—

beautiful, emaciated, unfinished,

cruelly abandoned with a flick of panache



by Monsieur Paul Valéry himself,

big fish in the school of Symbolism

and for a time, president of the Committee of Arts and Letters

of the League of Nations if you please.



Never mind how I got her out of the café,

past the concierge and up the flights of stairs—

remember that Paris is the capital of public kissing.



And never mind the holding and the pressing.

It is enough to know that I moved my pen

in such a way as to bring her to completion,



a simple, final stanza, which ended,

as this poem will, with the image

of a gorgeous orphan lying on a rumpled bed,

her large eyes closed,

a painting of cows in a valley over her head,



and off to the side, me in a window seat

blowing smoke from a cigarette at dawn.

two

Ballistics

When I came across the high-speed photograph

of a bullet that had just pierced a book—

the pages exploding with the velocity—



I forgot all about the marvels of photography

and began to wonder which book

the photographer had selected for the shot.



Many novels sprang to mind

including those of Raymond Chandler

where an extra bullet would hardly be noticed.



Nonfiction offered too many choices—

a history of Scottish lighthouses,

a biography of Joan of Arc and so forth.



Or it could be an anthology of medieval literature,

the bullet having just beheaded Sir Gawain

and scattered the band of assorted pilgrims.



But later, as I was drifting off to sleep,

I realized that the executed book

was a recent collection of poems written



by someone of whom I was not fond

and that the bullet must have passed through

his writing with little resistance



at twenty-eight hundred feet per second,

through the poems about his childhood

and the ones about the dreary state of the world,



and then through the author’s photograph,

through the beard, the round glasses,

and that special poet’s hat he loves to wear.

Pornography

In this sentimental painting of rustic life,

a rosy-cheeked fellow

in a broad hat and ballooning green pants



is twirling a peasant girl in a red frock

while a boy is playing a squeeze-box

near a turned-over barrel



upon which rest a knife, a jug, and a small drinking glass.

Two men in rough jackets

are playing cards at a wooden table.



And in the background a woman in a bonnet

stands behind the half-open Dutch door

talking to a merchant or a beggar who is leaning on a cane.



This is all I need to inject me with desire,

to fill me with the urge to lie down with you,

or someone very much like you,



on a cool marble floor or any fairly flat surface

as clouds go flying by

and the rustle of tall leafy trees



mixes with the notes of birdsong—

so clearly does the work speak of vanishing time,

obsolete musical instruments,



passing fancies, and the corpse

of the largely forgotten painter moldering

somewhere beneath the surface of present-day France.

Greek and Roman Statuary

The tip of the nose seemed the first to be lost,

then the arms and legs,

and later the stone penis if such a thing were featured.



And often an entire head followed the nose

as it might have done when bread

was baking in the side streets of ancient Rome.



No hope for the flute once attached

to the lips of that satyr with the puffed-out cheeks,

nor for the staff the shepherd boy once leaned on,



the sword no longer gripped by the warrior,

the poor lost ears of the sleeping boy,

and whatever it was Aphrodite once held in her severed hand.

“Collins reveals the unexpected within the ordinary. He peels back the surface of the humdrum to make the moment new.”
–The Christian Science Monitor

“Billy Collins demonstrates why he is one of our best poets, with his appealing trademark style: a self-deprecating charm, playful wit and unexpected imaginative leaps.”
–San Antonio Express-News

“By careful observation, Collins spins comic gold from the dross of quotidian suburban life. . . . Chipping away at the surface, he surprises you by scraping to the wood underneath, to some deeper truth.”
–Entertainment Weekly

“A poet of plentitude, irony, and Augustan grace.”
–The New Yorker

“It is difficult not to be charmed by Collins, and that in itself is a remarkable literary accomplishment.”
–The New York Review of Books

“Clever, subtle and engaging.”
–Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


From the Hardcover edition.