from The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988) Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House The neighbors' dog will not stop barking. He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark that 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 house and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast but 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 Beethoven had 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 is entreating him with his baton while the other musicians listen in respectful silence to the famous barking dog solo, that endless coda that first established Beethoven as an innovative genius. Walking Across the Atlantic I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach before stepping onto the first wave. Soon I am walking across the Atlantic thinking 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 what this must look like to the fish below, the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing. Plight of the Troubadour For a good hour I have been singing lays in langue d'oc to a woman who knows only langue d'oïl, an odd Picard dialect at that. The European love lyric is flourishing with every tremor of my voice, yet a friend has had to tap my shoulder to tell me she has not caught a word. My sentiments are tangled like kites in the branches of her incomprehension, and soon I will be lost in an anthology and poets will no longer wear hats like mine. Provence will be nothing more than a pink hue on a map or an answer on a test. And still the woman smiles over at me feigning this look of sisterly understanding. The Lesson In the morning when I found History snoring heavily on the couch, I took down his overcoat from the rack and placed its weight over my shoulder blades. It would protect me on the cold walk into the village for milk and the paper and I figured he would not mind, not after our long conversation the night before. How unexpected his blustering anger when I returned covered with icicles, the way he rummaged through the huge pockets making sure no major battle or English queen had fallen out and become lost in the deep snow. Winter Syntax A sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight, tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him. There are easier ways of making sense, the connoisseurship of gesture, for example. You hold a girl's face in your hands like a vase. You lift a gun from the glove compartment and toss it out the window into the desert heat. These cool moments are blazing with silence. The full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses it it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning outside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afternoon in a corner of the couch. Bare branches in winter are a form of writing. The unclothed body is autobiography. Every lake is a vowel, every island a noun. But the traveler persists in his misery, struggling all night through the deepening snow, leaving a faint alphabet of bootprints on the white hills and the white floors of valleys, a message for field mice and passing crows. At dawn he will spot the vine of smoke rising from your chimney, and when he stands before you shivering, draped in sparkling frost, a smile will appear in the beard of icicles, and the man will express a complete thought. Advice to Writers Even if it keeps you up all night, wash down the walls and scrub the floor of your study before composing a syllable. Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way. Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration. The more you clean, the more brilliant your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take to the open fields to scour the undersides of rocks or swab in the dark forest upper branches, nests full of eggs. When you find your way back home and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink, you will behold in the light of dawn the immaculate altar of your desk, a clean surface in the middle of a clean world. From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet, and cover pages with tiny sentences like long rows of devoted ants that followed you in from the woods. The Rival Poet The column of your book titles, always introducing your latest one, looms over me like Roman architecture. It is longer than the name of an Italian countess, longer than this poem will probably be. Etched on the head of a pin, my own production would leave room for The Lord's Prayer and many dancing angels. No matter. In my revenge daydream I am the one poised on the marble staircase high above the crowded ballroom. A retainer in livery announces me and the Contessa Maria Teresa Isabella Veronica Multalire Eleganza de Bella Ferrari. You are the one below fidgeting in your rented tux with some local Cindy hanging all over you. Insomnia After counting all the sheep in the world I enumerate the wildebeests, snails, camels, skylarks, etc., then I add up all the zoos and aquariums, country by country. By early light I am asleep in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood, yelling across the rising water at preoccupied Noah as his wondrous ark sails by and begins to grow smaller. Now a silhouette on the horizon, the only boat on earth is disappearing. As I rise and fall on the rocking waves, I concentrate on the giraffe couple, their necks craning over the roof, to keep my life from flashing before me. After all the animals wink out of sight I float on my back, eyes closed. I picture all the fish in creation leaping a fence in a field of water, one colorful species after another. Earthling You have probably come across those scales in planetariums that tell you how much you would weigh on other planets. You have noticed the fat ones lingering on the Mars scale and the emaciated slowing up the line for Neptune. As a creature of average weight, I fail to see the attraction. Imagine squatting in the wasteland of Pluto, all five tons of you, or wandering around Mercury wondering what to do next with your ounce. How much better to step onto the simple bathroom scale, a happy earthling feeling the familiar ropes of gravity, 157 pounds standing soaking wet a respectful distance from the sun. Books From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language. I picture a figure in the act of reading, shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book, a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie as the suicide of lovers saturates a page, or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem. He moves from paragraph to paragraph as if touring a house of endless, paneled rooms. I hear the voice of my mother reading to me from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs, and inside her voice lie other distant sounds, the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night, a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech. I watch myself building bookshelves in college, walls within walls, as rain soaks New England, or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat. I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow; when evening is shadowing the forest and small birds flutter down to consume the crumbs, we have to listen hard to hear the voices of the boy and his sister receding into the woods. Bar Time In keeping with universal saloon practice, the clock here is set fifteen minutes ahead of all the clocks in the outside world. This makes us a rather advanced group, doing our drinking in the unknown future, immune from the cares of the present, safely harbored a quarter of an hour beyond the woes of the contemporary scene. No wonder such thoughtless pleasure derives from tending the small fire of a cigarette, from observing this glass of whiskey and ice, the cold rust I am sipping, or from having an eye on the street outside when Ordinary Time slouches past in a topcoat, rain running off the brim of his hat, the late edition like a flag in his pocket. My Number Is Death miles away from this house, reaching for a widow in Cincinnati or breathing down the neck of a lost hiker in British Columbia? Is he too busy making arrangements, tampering with air brakes, scattering cancer cells like seeds, loosening the wooden beams of roller coasters to bother with my hidden cottage that visitors find so hard to find? Or is he stepping from a black car parked at the dark end of the lane, shaking open the familiar cloak, its hood raised like the head of a crow, and removing the scythe from the trunk? Did you have any trouble with the directions? I will ask, as I start talking my way out of this. Introduction to Poetry 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 water-ski 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. The Brooklyn Museum of Art I will now step over the soft velvet rope and walk directly into this massive Hudson River painting and pick my way along the Palisades with this stick I snapped off a dead tree. I will skirt the smoky, nestled towns and seek the path that leads always outward until I become lost, without a hope of ever finding the way back to the museum. I will stand on the bluffs in nineteenth-century clothes, a dwarf among rock, hills, and flowing water, and I will fish from the banks in a straw hat which will feel like a brush stroke on my head. And I will hide in the green covers of forests so no appreciator of Frederick Edwin Church, leaning over the soft velvet rope, will spot my tiny figure moving in the stillness and cry out, pointing for the others to see, and be thought mad and led away to a cell where there is no vaulting landscape to explore, none of this birdsong that halts me in my tracks, and no wide curving of this river that draws my steps toward the misty vanishing point. Schoolsville Glancing over my shoulder at the past, I realize the number of students I have taught is enough to populate a small town. I can see it nestled in a paper landscape, chalk dust flurrying down in winter, nights dark as a blackboard. The population ages but never graduates. On hot afternoons they sweat the final in the park and when it's cold they shiver around stoves reading disorganized essays out loud. A bell rings on the hour and everybody zigzags into the streets with their books. I forgot all their last names first and their first names last in alphabetical order. But the boy who always had his hand up is an alderman and owns the haberdashery. The girl who signed her papers in lipstick leans against the drugstore, smoking, brushing her hair like a machine. Their grades are sewn into their clothes like references to Hawthorne. The A's stroll along with other A's. The D's honk whenever they pass another D. All the creative-writing students recline on the courthouse lawn and play the lute. Wherever they go, they form a big circle. Needless to say, I am the mayor. I live in the white colonial at Maple and Main. I rarely leave the house. The car deflates in the driveway. Vines twirl around the porch swing. Once in a while a student knocks on the door with a term paper fifteen years late or a question about Yeats or double-spacing. And sometimes one will appear in a windowpane to watch me lecturing the wallpaper, quizzing the chandelier, reprimanding the air. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
