poems by Billy Collins

BUDAPESTby Billy Collins

My pen moves along the pagelike the snout of a strange animalshaped like a human armand dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater

I watch it sniffing the paper ceaselesslyintent as any forager that has nothing on its mindbut the grubs and insectsthat will allow it to live another day

It wants only to be here tomorrowdressed, perhaps, in the sleeve of a plaid shirtnose pressed against the pagewriting a few more dutyful lines

while I gaze out the windowand imagine Budapestor some other citywhere 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 onewho is lifted up by the ribs, then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouseto sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,but how would you like itif 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?

Forgetfulnessby Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to gofollowed obediently by the title, the plot,the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novelwhich suddenly becomes one you have never read,never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbordecided 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 goodbyeand 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 riverwhose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,well on your own way to oblivion where you will join thosewho have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

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

The Country by Billy Collins

I wondered about youwhen you told me never to leavea box of wooden, strike-anywhere matcheslying 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 tinwhere the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?Who could whisk away the thoughtof one unlikely mousepadding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpapergripping a single wooden matchbetween 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 creaturefor one bright, shining momentsuddenly thrust ahead of his time-

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearerin a forgotten ritual, little brown druidilluminating some ancient night.Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulationthe tiny looks of wonderment on the facesof his fellow mice, onetime inhabitantsof 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 heavenas 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 silentand 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 Parthenonon 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 ageJudy Garland was pulling down 150,000 dollars a picture,Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victoryand Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room –no wait, I mean he had invented the calculator?

Of course, there will be time for all thatlater in your life, after you come out of your roomand begin to blossom,or at least pick up all your socks.

For some reason I keep rememberingthat Lady Jane Grey was queen of Englandwhen 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 operasand two complete masses as a youngster.

But of course, that was in Austriaat the height of Romantic lyricism,not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.

Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15or 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 laidon the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a morecomplicated matter with mother-of-pearlbuttons down the back,so tiny and numerous that it takes foreverbefore my hands can part the fabric,like a swimmer’s dividing water,and slip inside.

You will want to knowthat she was standingby an open window in an upstairs bedroom,motionless, a little wide-eyed,looking out at the orchard below,the white dress puddled at her feeton the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women’s undergarmentsin nineteenth-century Americais not to be waved off,and I proceeded like a polar explorerthrough clips, clasps, and moorings,catches, straps, and whalebone stays,sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebookit 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 dasheswhenever we spoke.

What I can tell you isit was terribly quiet in Amherstthat Sabbath afternoon,nothing but a carriage passing the house,a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhalewhen I undid the very tophook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,the way some readers sigh when they realizethat Hope has feathers,that reason is a plank,that life is a loaded gunthat looks right at you with a yellow eye.

Nightclub by Billy Collins

You are so beautiful and I am a foolto be in love with youis a theme that keeps coming upin songs and poems.There seems to be no room for variation.I have never heard anyone singI am so beautifuland you are a fool to be in love with me,even though this notion has surelycrossed the minds of women and men alike.You are so beautiful, too bad you are a foolis 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 afternoonI am listening to Johnny Hartmanwhose dark voice can curl aroundthe concepts on love, beauty, and foolishnesslike no one else's can.It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarettesomeone left burning on a baby grand pianoaround three o'clock in the morning;smoke that billows up into the bright lightswhile out there in the darknesssome of the beautiful fools have gatheredaround little tables to listen,some with their eyes closed,others leaning forward into the musicas 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 roomis watching the large man with the tenor saxthat hangs from his neck like a golden fish.He moves forward to the edge of the stageand hands the instrument down to meand nods that I should play.So I put the mouthpiece to my lipsand blow into it with all my living breath.We are all so foolish,my long bebop solo begins by saying,so damn foolishwe 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 grassand 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 closeto being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will showthat you are neither the boots in the cornernor 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 treesand 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 barkthat 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 houseand put on a Beethoven symphony full blastbut 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 Beethovenhad 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 isentreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectfulsilence to the famous barking dog solo,that endless coda that first establishedBeethoven 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 breatherfrom painting The Blinding of Sampson.

But in this one Goya stands well back from the mirrorand is seen posed in the clutter of his studioaddressing a canvas tilted back on a tall easel.

He appears to be smiling out at us as if he knewwe would be amused by the extraordinary hat on his headwhich 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 liketo be wearing such a chandelier on your headas if you were a walking dining room or concert hall.

But once you see this hat there is no need to readany biography of Goya or to memorize his dates.

To understand Goya you only have to imagine himlighting the candles one by one, then placingthe 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 housewith all the shadows flying across the walls.

Imagine a lost traveler knocking on his doorone 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 legsand sauntered off the beaches into forestsworking up some irregular verbs for theirfirst conversation, so three-year-old childrenenter the phase of name-calling.

Every day a new one arrives and is addedto 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 mugsflushed with challenge.Nothing Samuel Johnson would bother tossing outin a pub, but then the toddlers are not tryingto devastate some fatuous Enlightenment hack.

They are just tormenting their fellow squirtsor going after the attention of the giantsway up there with their cocktails and bad breathtalking baritone nonsense to other giants,

waiting to call them names after thankingthem for the lovely party and hearing the door close.

The mature save their hothead invectivefor 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 bedfor his appalling behavior,that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,their wives are Dopey Dopeheadsand 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 billboardand all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famousdomes and there is no need to memorize a successionof kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon'slittle bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.

How much better to command the simple precinct of homethan 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 cameraeager 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 waitressknown as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morningpaper, all language barriers down,rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.

And after breakfast, I will not have to find someonewilling to photograph me with my arm around the owner.I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journalwhat 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 itselfand sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed offdown 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 Susquehannaor on any river for that matterto be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any monthhave I had the pleasure -- if it is a pleasure --of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be foundin 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 sensationof fishing on the Susquehanna.

There is little doubtthat others have been fishingon the Susquehanna,

rowing upstream in a wooden boat,sliding the oars under the waterthen raising them to drip in the light.

But the nearest I have ever come tofishing on the Susquehannawas one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia,

when I balanced a little egg of timein front of a paintingin 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, greenflat-bottom boatholding the thin whip of a pole.

That is something I am unlikelyever to do, I remembersaying to myself and the person next to me.

Then I blinked and moved on

to other American scenesof haystacks, water whitening over rocks,

even one of a brown harewho seemed so wired with alertness

I imagined him springing right out of the frame.

Flames by Billy Collins

Smokey the Bear headsinto the autumn woodswith a red can of gasolineand a box of wooden matches.

His ranger's hat is cockedat a disturbing angle.

His brown fur gleamsunder the high sunas his paws, the sizeof catcher's mitts,crackle into the distance.

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

He is going to show themhow a professional does it.

For Bartleby The Scrivener by Billy Collins

"Every time we get a big gale around heresome people just refuse to batten down."

we estimate that

ice skating into a sixtymile an hour wind, fully exertingthe legs and swinging arms

you will be pushed backwardan inch every twenty minutes.

in a few days, depending onthe size of the lake,the backs of your skateswill touch land.

you will then fall on your assand be blown into the forest.

if you gather enough speedby flapping your armsand keeping your skates pointed

you will catch up to otherflying people who refused to batten down.you will exchange knowing wavesas you ride the great wind north.

I Ask You by Billy Collins

What scene would I want to be enveloped inmore 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 thinkabout 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 tablethere is nothing that I need,not even a job that would allow me to row to work,or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4with 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 fishin a frame on the wall,and the way these three candles--each a different height--are singing in perfect harmony.

So forgive meif I lower my head now and listento the short bass candle as he takes a solowhile my heartthrums under my shirt--frog at the edge of a pond--and my thoughts fly off to a provincemade of one enormous skyand 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 motherbrooding over her sightless young triplets.

Or was it a common accident, all three caughtin 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 mouseto locate even one fellow mouse with visionlet alone two other blind ones?

And how, in their tiny darkness,could they possibly have run after a farmer's wifeor anyone else's wife for that matter?Not to mention why.

Just so she could cut off their tailswith a carving knife, is the cynic's answer,but the thought of them without eyesand now without tails to trail through the moist grass

or slip around the corner of a baseboardhas the cynic who always lounges within meup off his couch and at the windowtrying to hide the rising softness that he feels.

By now I am on to dicing an onionwhich might account for the wet stingingin my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard'smournful 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 soaccording to the calendarit will probably look

like a silver football,and nine, maybe ten days agoit reminded me of a thin bright claw.

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

it will waste awayto nothing,nothing but stars in the sky,

and I will have a few nightsto myself,a little time to rest my jittery pen.

Japan by Billy Collins

Today I pass the time readinga favorite haiku,saying the few words over and over.

It feels like eatingthe same small, perfect grapeagain and again.

I walk through the house reciting itand leave its letters fallingthrough 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 floorand whisper it into each of his long white ears.

It's the one about the one-ton temple bellwith the moth sleeping on its surface,

and every time I say it, I feel the excruciatingpressure of the mothon 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 belland 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 flownfrom its lineand moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.

Madmen by Billy Collins

They say you can jinx a poemif 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 youI wanted to write about the madmen,as the newspapers so blithely call them,who attack art, not in reviews,but with breadknives and hammersin 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 smockswho close the wound in the landscape,and thus ruin the true art of the mad.

I watched my poem fly down to the frontof the bar and hover thereuntil the next customer walked in--then I watched it fly out the open door into the nightand sail away, I could only imagine,over the dark tenements of the city.

All I had wished to saywas 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 alonewith nothing swinging in the cage of my heartexcept the faint hope that I mightcatch a glimpse of the thingin 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 Streetwith Sonny Rollins for company,his music flowing through the soft calipersof these earphones,

as if he were right beside meon 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 saymy delight at being suffusedwith phrases from his saxophone --some like honey, some like vinegar --is surpassed only by my gratitude

to Tommy Potter for taking the timeto join us on this breezy afternoonwith his most unwieldy bassand to the esteemed Arthur Taylorwho is somehow managing to navigate

this crowd with his cumbersome drums.And I bow deeply to Thelonious Monkfor figuring out a wayto motorize -- or whatever -- his huge pianoso he could be with us today.

This music is loud yet so confidential.I cannot help feeling even morelike the center of the universethan usual as I walk along to a rapidlittle 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 overto the south side of the streetand then, in our own tightly knit way,turn the corner at Sixth Avenue.

And if any of you are curiousabout where this aggregation,this whole battery-powered crew,is headed, let us just saythat the real center of the universe,

the only true point of view,

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

Hunger by Billy Collins

The fox you lug over your shoulderin a dark sackhas cut a hole with a knifeand escaped.

The sudden lightness makes you thinkyou are strongeras you walk back to your small cottagethrough a forest that covers the world.

Walking Across The Atlantic by Billy Collins

I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beachbefore stepping onto the first wave.

Soon I am walking across the Atlanticthinking 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 whatthis must look like to the fish below,the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing.