EXERPT (continued from previous page)
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 Bogotá.
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.
Later, when the time is right,
we might sit down with the boss,
wash the car, or linger at a candle-lit table,
but now is the hour for pouring the juice
and flipping the eggs with one eye on the toaster.
So let us slice a banana and uncap the jam,
lift our brimming spoons of milk,
and leave it to the others to lower a flag
or spin absurdly in a barber's chair -
those antipodal oddballs, always early or late.
Let us praise Sir Stanford Fleming,
the Canadian genius who first scored
with these lines the length of the spinning earth.
Let us move together through the rest of this day
passing in unison from light to shadow,
coasting over the crest of noon
into the valley of the evening
and then, holding hands,
slip into the deeper valley of night.
The Long Day
In the morning I ate a banana
like a young ape
and worked on a poem called "Nocturne."
In the afternoon I opened the mail
with a short kitchen knife,
and when dusk began to fall
I took off my clothes,
put on "Sweetheart of the Rodeo"
and soaked in a claw-footed bathtub.
I closed my eyes and thought
about the alphabet,
the letters filing out of the halls of kindergarten
to become literature.
If the British call z zed,
I wondered, why not call b bed and d dead?
And why does z, which looks like
the fastest letter, come at the very end?
unless they are all moving east
when we are facing north in our chairs.
It was then that I heard
a clap of thunder and the dog's bark,
and the claw-footed bathtub
took one step forward,
or was it backward
I had to ask
as I turned
to reach for a faraway towel.
TWO
I Ask You
What scene would I rather
be enveloped in than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
at ease in a box of floral wallpaper,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?
Excerpted from The Trouble with Poetry
by Billy Collins
Copyright © 2005 by Billy Collins.
Random House, a division of Random House, Inc.
Let your life
be the poem you write.
