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The Trouble with Poetry

Random House

Chapter One

ONE

Monday

The birds are in their trees,

the toast is in the toaster,

and the poets are at their windows.

They are at their windows

in every section of the tangerine of earth-

the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,

the American poets gazing out

at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.

The clerks are at their desks,

the miners are down in their mines,

and the poets are looking out their windows

maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,

and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.

The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong

game of proofreading,

glancing back and forth from page to page,

the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,

and the poets are at their windows

because it is their job for which

they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

Which window it hardly seems to matter

though many have a favorite,

for there is always something to see-

a bird grasping a thin branch,

the headlights of a taxi rounding a corner,

those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.

The fishermen bob in their boats,

the linemen climb their round poles,

the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,

and the poets continue to stare

at the cracked birdbath or a limb knocked down by the wind.

By now, it should go without saying

that what the oven is to the baker

and the berry-stained blouse to the dry cleaner,

so the window is to the poet.

Just think-

before the invention of the window,

the poets would have had to put on a jacket

and a winter hat to go outside

or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.

And when I say a wall,

I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper

and a sketch of a cow in a frame.

I mean a cold wall of fieldstones,

the wall of the medieval sonnet,

the original woman's heart of stone,

the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover.

Statues in the Park

I thought of you today

when I stopped before an equestrian statue

in the middle of a public square,

you who had once instructed me

in the code of these noble poses.

A horse rearing up with two legs raised,

you told me, meant the rider had died in battle.

If only one leg was lifted,

the man had elsewhere succumbed to his wounds;

and if four legs were touching the ground,

as they were in this case-

bronze hooves affixed to a stone base-

it meant that the man on the horse,

this one staring intently

over the closed movie theater across the street,

had died of a cause other than war.

In the shadow of the statue,

I wondered about the others

who had simply walked through life

without a horse, a saddle, or a sword-

pedestrians who could no longer

place one foot in front of the other.

I pictured statues of the sickly

recumbent on their cold stone beds,

the suicides toeing the marble edge,

statues of accident victims covering their eyes,

the murdered covering their wounds,

the drowned silently treading the air.

And there was I,

up on a rosy-gray block of granite

near a cluster of shade trees in the local park,

my name and dates pressed into a plaque,

down on my knees, eyes lifted,

praying to the passing clouds,

forever begging for just one more day.

Traveling Alone

At the hotel coffee shop that morning,

the waitress was wearing a pink uniform

with "Florence" written in script over her heart.

And the man who checked my bag

had a nameplate that said "Ben."

Behind him was a long row of royal palms.

On the plane, two women poured drinks

from a cart they rolled down the narrow aisle-

"Debbie" and "Lynn" according to their winged tags.

And such was my company

as I arced from coast to coast,

and so I seldom spoke, and then only

of the coffee, the bag, the tiny bottles of vodka.

I said little more than "Thank you"

and "Can you take this from me, please?"

Yet I began to sense that all of them

were ready to open up,

to get to know me better, perhaps begin a friendship.

Florence looked irritated

as she shuffled from table to table,

but was she just hiding her need

to know about my early years-

the ball I would toss and catch in my hands,

the times I hid behind my mother's dress?

And was I so wrong in seeing in Ben's eyes

a glimmer of interest in my theories

and habits-my view of the Enlightenment,

my love of cards, the hours I tended to keep?

And what about Debbie and Lynn?

Did they not look eager to ask about my writing process,

my way of composing in the morning

by a window, which I would have admitted

if they had just had the courage to ask.

And strangely enough-I would have continued

as they stopped pouring drinks

and the other passengers turned to listen-

the only emotion I ever feel, Debbie and Lynn,

is what the beaver must feel,

as he bears each stick to his hidden construction,

which creates the tranquil pond

and gives the mallards somewhere to paddle,

the pair of swans a place to conceal their young.

House

I lie in a bedroom of a house

that was built in 1862, we were told-

the two windows still facing east

into the bright daily reveille of the sun.

The early birds are chirping,

and I think of those who have slept here before,

the family we bought the house from-

the five Critchlows-

and the engineer they told us about

who lived here alone before them,

the one who built onto the back

of the house a large glassy room with wood beams.

I have an old photograph of the house

in black and white, a few small trees,

and a curved dirt driveway,

but I do not know who lived here then.

So I go back to the Civil War

and to the farmer who built the house

and the rough stone walls

that encompass the house and run up into the woods,

he who mounted his thin wife in this room,

while the war raged to the south,

with the strength of a dairyman

or with the tenderness of a dairyman

or with both, alternating back and forth

so as to give his wife much pleasure

and to call down a son to earth

to take over the cows and the farm

when he no longer had the strength

after all the days and nights of toil and prayer-

the sun breaking over the same horizon

into these same windows,

lighting the same bed-space where I lie

having nothing to farm, and no son,

the dead farmer and his dead wife for company,

feeling better and worse by turns.

In the Moment

It was a day in June, all lawn and sky,

the kind that gives you no choice

but to unbutton your shirt

and sit outside in a rough wooden chair.

And if a glass of ice tea and a volume

of seventeenth-century poetry

with a dark blue cover are available,

then the picture can hardly be improved.

I remember a fly kept landing on my wrist,

and two black butterflies

with white and red wing-dots

bobbed around my head in the bright air.

I could feel the day offering itself to me,

and I wanted nothing more

than to be in the moment-but which moment?

Not that one, or that one, or that one,

or any of those that were scuttling by

seemed perfectly right for me.

Plus, I was too knotted up with questions

about the past and his tall, evasive sister, the future.

What churchyard held the bones of George Herbert?

Why did John Donne's wife die so young?

And more pressingly,

what could we serve the vegetarian twins

who were coming to dinner that evening?

Who knew that they would bring their own grapes?

And why was the driver of that pickup

flying down the road toward the lone railroad track?

And so the priceless moments of the day

were squandered one by one-

or more likely a thousand at a time-

with quandary and pointless interrogation.

All I wanted was to be a pea of being

inside the green pod of time,

but that was not going to happen today,

I had to admit to myself

as I closed the book on the face

of Thomas Traherne and returned to the house

where I lit a flame under a pot

full of floating brown eggs,

and, while they cooked in their bubbles,

I stared into a small oval mirror near the sink

to see if that crazy glass

had anything special to tell me today.

The Peasants' Revolt

Soon enough it will all be over-

the shirt hanging from the doorknob,

trees beyond the windows,

and the kettle of water bubbling on a burner.

Soon enough, soon enough,

the many will be overwhelmed by the one.

Instead of the shaded road to the house,

the blue wheelbarrow upended,

and a picture book across my hips in bed,

just an expanse of white ink,

or a dark tunnel coiling away and down.

No sunflowers, no notebook,

no sand-colored denim jacket

and a piece of straw in the teeth,

just a hole inside a larger hole

and the starless maw of space.

But we are still here,

with all the world before us,

a beaded glass of water on the night table,

and the rest of this summer afternoon ahead.

So undo the buttons on your white blouse

and toss it over a chair back.

Let us lie down side by side

on these crisp sheets like two effigies on a tomb,

supine in a shadowy corner of a cathedral.

Let us be as still and serene

as Richard II and Anne of Bohemia-

he who ended the Peasants' Revolt so ruthlessly

and she to whom he was so devoted,

now entombed together, hand in stone hand.

Let us close our eyes to the white room

and let the fan blades on the ceiling cool us

as they turn like the hands of a speeding clock.

Theme

It's a sunny weekday in early May

and after a ham sandwich

and a cold bottle of beer on the brick terrace,

I am consumed by the wish

to add something

to one of the ancient themes-

youth dancing with his eyes closed,

for example,

in the shadows of corruption and death,

or the rise and fall of illustrious men

strapped to the turning

wheel of mischance and disaster.

There is a slight breeze,

just enough to bend

the yellow tulips on their stems,

but that hardly helps me

echo the longing for immortality

despite the roaring juggernaut of time,

or the painful motif

of Nature's cyclical return

versus man's blind rush to the grave.

I could loosen my shirt

and lie down in the soft grass,

sweet now after its first cutting,

but that would not produce

a record of the pursuit

of the moth of eternal beauty

or the despondency that attends

the eventual dribble

of the once gurgling fountain of creativity.

So, as far as the great topics go,

that seems to leave only

the fall from exuberant maturity

into sudden, headlong decline-

a subject that fills me with silence

and leaves me with no choice

but to spend the rest of the day

sniffing the jasmine vine

and surrendering to the ivory governance

of the piano by picking out

with my index finger

the melody notes of "Easy to Love,"

a song in which Cole Porter expresses,

with put-on nonchalance,

the hopelessness of a love

brimming with desire

and a hunger for affection,

but met only and always with frosty disregard.

Eastern Standard Time

Poetry speaks to all people, it is said,

but here I would like to address

only those in my own time zone,

this proper slice of longitude

that runs from pole to snowy pole

down the globe through Montreal to Bogota.

Oh, fellow inhabitants of this singular band,

sitting up in your many beds this morning-

the sun falling through the windows

and casting a shadow on the sundial-

consider those in other zones who cannot hear these words.

They are not slipping into a bathrobe as we are,

or following the smell of coffee in a timely fashion.

Rather, they are at work already,

leaning on copy machines,

hammering nails into a house-frame.

They are not swallowing a vitamin like us;

rather they are smoking a cigarette under a half moon,

even jumping around on a dance floor,

or just now sliding under the covers,

pulling down the little chains on their bed lamps.

But we are not like these others,

for at this very moment on the face of the earth,

we are standing under a hot shower,

or we are eating our breakfast,

considered by people of all zones

to be the most important meal of the day.

Continues...

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Excerpted from The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins Excerpted by permission.
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