Billy Collins

[anirbas]

Ignorance

It's only a cold, cloud-hooded weekday
in the middle of winter,
but I am sitting up in my body
like a man riding an elephant
draped with a carpet of red and gold,
his turban askew,
singing a song about the return of the cranes.

And I am inside my own head
like a tiny homunculus,
a creature so excited over his naked existence
that he scurries all day
from one eye socket to the other
just to see what scenes are unfolding before me,
what streets, what pastures.

And to think that just hours ago
I was as sour as Samuel Johnson
with a few bad sherries in him,
quarreling in a corner of the Rat and Parrot,
full of scorn for the impertinence of men,
the inconstancy of women.

An to think further that I have no idea
what might have uplifted me,
unless it was when I first opened
the front door to look at the sky
so extensive and burdened with snow,
or was it this morning
when I walked along the reservoir?

Was it when the dog
scared up some ducks off the water
and I stopped to watch them flapping low
over the frozen sufrace,
and I counted them in flight,
all seven--the leader and the six hurrying behind.

~Billy Collins.

[anirbas]

Death in New Orleans, a Romance

Long into the night my pencil
hurried across the page,
a young messenger boy
running his nervous little errands,
making lines,
making comparisons--
the world is like this, the moon like that,

the mind, I wrote, is like a wire birdcage
hanging from a stand
with a wooden perch and a tiny mirror,
home of a single canary,
I went on,
always the same one, the same song every day,
then quiet under the floral hood of night.

Always the same yellow and white feathers,
I continued,
yellow for the past, white for the future--
I added for symbolic weight--
and on the day I die,
I wrote, curving toward the elegaic,

the wire door will swing open
and the bird take flight,
looping over the ironwork of the city,
the water tanks and windowed buildings,
then up into the clouds and stars,
I typed,

leaving my body behind,
slumped upon a cafe' table,
my empty head in a pool of wine,
the waiter and two customers
bending over me with obvious concern.

~Billy Collins.

[anirbas]

To My Patron

I do not require a ton of pink marble,
a hundred tubes of paint,
or an enormous skylit loft.

All I need is a pen,
a little blank notebook,
and a lamp with a seventy-five-watt bulb.

Of course, an oak desk would be nice,
maybe a chair of ergonomic design,
and a collie lying on an oval rug,
always ready to follow me anywhere
or just sniff my empty palm.

And I would not turn down a house
canopied by shade trees,
a swing suspended from a high limb,
flowering azaleas around the porch,
pink, red, and white.

I might as well add to that list
a constant supply of pills
that would allow me to stay awake all night
without blinking,
a cellar full of dusty bottles of Bordeaux,
a small radio--
nothing, I assure you, would go unappreciated.

Now if you wouldn't mind
leaving me alone--
and please close the door behind you
so there won't be such a draft
on my shoulders--
I will get back to work
on my long metrical poem,
the one I will recite to the cheering throng
prior to your impending beheading.

~Billy Collins.

~*~

This poem and the previous two, are from Billy Collin's collection of poems, titled Nine Horses.

[anirbas]

Poetry

Call it a field where the animals
who were forgotten by the Ark
come to graze under the evening clouds.

Or a cistern where the rain that fell
before history trickles over a concrete lip.

However you see it,
this is no place to set up
the three-legged easel of realism

or make a reader climb
over the many fences of a plot.

Let the portly novelist
with his noisy typewriter
describe the city where Francine was born,

how Albert read the paper on the train,
how curtains were blowing in the bedroom.

Let the playwright with her torn cardigan
and a dog curled on the rug
move the characters

from the wings to the stage
to face the many-eyed darkness of the house.

Poetry is no place for that.
We have enough to do
complaining about the price of tobacco,

passing the dripping ladle,
and singing songs to a bird in a cage.

We are busy doing nothing-
and all we need for that is an afternoon,
a rowboat under a blue sky,

and maybe a man fishing from a stone bridge,
or, better still, nobody on that bridge at all.

-Billy Collins

appointed Poet Laureate
of the United States for 2002-2002;
reappointed for 2002-2003.