Aimless Love Read online




  Copyright © 2013 by Billy Collins.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-679-64405-7

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-8465-1

  www.atrandom.com

  Book design by Dana Leigh Blanchette

  Title-page and part-title photograph: © iStockphoto.com

  v3.1

  Little soul

  little stray

  little drifter

  now where will you stay

  all pale and all alone

  after the way

  you used to make fun of things?

  —Hadrian

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Reader

  FROM NINE HORSES

  (2002)

  The Country

  Velocity

  “More Than a Woman”

  Aimless Love

  Absence

  Royal Aristocrat

  Paris

  Istanbul

  Love

  Obituaries

  Today

  Creatures

  Tipping Point

  Nine Horses

  Litany

  The Literary Life

  Writing in the Afterlife

  No Time

  Elk River Falls

  Christmas Sparrow

  Surprise

  Poetry

  FROM THE TROUBLE WITH POETRY

  (2005)

  Monday

  Statues in the Park

  House

  The Long Day

  In the Evening

  Flock

  Building with Its Face Blown Off

  The Lanyard

  Boy Shooting at a Statue

  Genius

  The Order of the Day

  The Centrifuge

  The Revenant

  Carry

  Fool Me Good

  The Trouble with Poetry

  FROM BALLISTICS

  (2008)

  Brightly Colored Boats Upturned on the Banks of the Charles

  Searching

  High

  The Four-Moon Planet

  No Things

  The First Night

  January in Paris

  Ballistics

  Pornography

  Greek and Roman Statuary

  Scenes of Hell

  Hippos on Holiday

  Lost

  Tension

  The Golden Years

  (detail)

  Adage

  The Flight of the Statues

  Baby Listening

  Bathtub Families

  The Fish

  A Dog on His Master

  The Great American Poem

  Divorce

  This Little Piggy Went to Market

  Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant

  Oh, My God!

  The Future

  Envoy

  FROM HOROSCOPES FOR THE DEAD

  (2011)

  Grave

  Palermo

  Memento Mori

  The Guest

  Gold

  Genesis

  Horoscopes for the Dead

  Hell

  A Question About Birds

  Watercoloring

  Poem on the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Trinity School

  The Chairs That No One Sits In

  Memorizing “The Sun Rising” by John Donne

  My Unborn Children

  Hangover

  Table Talk

  Delivery

  What She Said

  Drawing You from Memory

  Cemetery Ride

  Lakeside

  My Hero

  Poetry Workshop Held in a Former Cigar Factory in Key West

  Returning the Pencil to Its Tray

  NEW POEMS

  The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska

  Foundling

  Catholicism

  Carrara

  Report from the Subtropics

  Lesson for the Day

  Promenade

  The Unfortunate Traveler

  Drinking Alone

  To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl

  Animal Behavior

  Lincoln

  Note to Antonín Dvorák

  Sunday Walk

  The Suggestion Box

  Cheerios

  Quandary

  Elusive

  Looking for a Friend in a Crowd of Arriving Passengers: A Sonnet

  Digging

  Central Park

  Osprey

  Here and There

  Villanelle

  Lines Written at Flying Point Beach

  Lines Written in a Garden by a Cottage in Herefordshire

  American Airlines #371

  Keats: or How I Got My Negative Capability Back

  The Music of the Spheres

  Orient

  Heraclitus on Vacation

  Ode to a Desk Lamp

  Irish Poetry

  After the Funeral

  Best Fall

  France

  All Eyes

  Rome in June

  The Deep

  Biographical Notes in an Anthology of Haiku

  Florida in December

  Dining Alone

  Lucky Bastards

  “I Love You”

  Unholy Sonnet #1

  If This Were a Job I’d Be Fired

  Friends in the Dark

  Flying Over West Texas at Christmas

  Last Meal

  A Word About Transitions

  The Names

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Reader

  Looker, gazer, skimmer, skipper,

  thumb-licking page turner, peruser,

  you getting your print-fix for the day,

  pencil-chewer, note taker, marginalianist

  with your checks and X’s

  first-timer or revisiter,

  browser, speedster, English major,

  flight-ready girl, melancholy boy,

  invisible companion, thief, blind date, perfect stranger—

  that is me rushing to the window

  to see if it’s you passing under the shade trees

  with a baby carriage or a dog on a leash,

  me picking up the phone

  to imagine your unimaginable number,

  me standing by a map of the world

  wondering where you are—

  alone on a bench in a train station

  or falling asleep, the book sliding to the floor.

  FROM NINE HORSES

  (2002)

  The Country

  I wondered about you

  when you told me never to leave

  a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches

  lying 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 tin

  where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

  Who could sleep that night?

  Who could whisk away the thought

  of the one unlikely mouse

  padding along a cold water pipe

  behind the floral wallpaper

  gripping a single wooden match

  between the needles of his teeth?

  Who could not see him rounding a corner,

  th
e blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,

  the sudden flare, and the creature

  for one bright, shining moment

  suddenly thrust ahead of his time—

  now a fire-starter, now a torch-bearer

  in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid

  illuminating some ancient night.

  Who could fail to notice,

  lit up in the blazing insulation,

  the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces

  of his fellow mice, one-time inhabitants

  of what once was your house in the country?

  Velocity

  In the club car that morning I had my notebook

  open on my lap and my pen uncapped,

  looking every inch the writer

  right down to the little writer’s frown on my face,

  but there was nothing to write about

  except life and death

  and the low warning sound of the train whistle.

  I did not want to write about the scenery

  that was flashing past, cows spread over a pasture,

  hay rolled up meticulously—

  things you see once and will never see again.

  But I kept my pen moving by drawing

  over and over again

  the face of a motorcyclist in profile—

  for no reason I can think of—

  a biker with sunglasses and a weak chin,

  leaning forward, helmetless,

  his long thin hair trailing behind him in the wind.

  I also drew many lines to indicate speed,

  to show the air becoming visible

  as it broke over the biker’s face

  the way it was breaking over the face

  of the locomotive that was pulling me

  toward Omaha and whatever lay beyond Omaha

  for me, all the other stops to make

  before the time would arrive to stop for good.

  We must always look at things

  from the point of view of eternity,

  the college theologians used to insist,

  from which, I imagine, we would all

  appear to have speed lines trailing behind us

  as we rush along the road of the world,

  as we rush down the long tunnel of time—

  the biker, of course, drunk on the wind,

  but also the man reading by a fire,

  speed lines coming off his shoulders and his book,

  and the woman standing on a beach

  studying the curve of horizon,

  even the child asleep on a summer night,

  speed lines flying from the posters of her bed,

  from the white tips of the pillow cases,

  and from the edges of her perfectly motionless body.

  “More Than a Woman”

  Ever since I woke up today,

  a song has been playing uncontrollably

  in my head—a tape looping

  over the spools of the brain,

  a rosary in the hands of a frenetic nun,

  mad fan belt of a tune.

  It must have escaped from the radio

  last night on the drive home

  and tunneled while I slept

  from my ears to the center of my cortex.

  It is a song so cloying and vapid

  I won’t even bother mentioning the title,

  but on it plays as if I were a turntable

  covered with dancing children

  and their spooky pantomimes,

  as if everything I had ever learned

  was being slowly replaced

  by its slinky chords and the puff-balls of its lyrics.

  It played while I watered the plants

  and continued when I brought in the mail

  and fanned out the letters on a table.

  It repeated itself when I took a walk

  and watched from a bridge

  brown leaves floating in the channels of a current.

  Late in the afternoon it seemed to fade,

  but I heard it again at the restaurant

  when I peered in at the lobsters

  lying on the bottom of an illuminated

  tank which was filled to the brim

  with their copious tears.

  And now at this dark window

  in the middle of the night

  I am beginning to think

  I could be listening to music of the spheres,

  the sound no one ever hears

  because it has been playing forever,

  only the spheres are colored pool balls,

  and the music is oozing from a jukebox

  whose lights I can just make out through the clouds.

  Aimless Love

  This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,

  I fell in love with a wren

  and later in the day with a mouse

  the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

  In the shadows of an autumn evening,

  I fell for a seamstress

  still at her machine in the tailor’s window,

  and later for a bowl of broth,

  steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

  This is the best kind of love, I thought,

  without recompense, without gifts,

  or unkind words, without suspicion,

  or silence on the telephone.

  The love of the chestnut,

  the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

  No lust, no slam of the door—

  the love of the miniature orange tree,

  the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,

  the highway that cuts across Florida.

  No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor—

  just a twinge every now and then

  for the wren who had built her nest

  on a low branch overhanging the water

  and for the dead mouse,

  still dressed in its light brown suit.

  But my heart is always propped up

  in a field on its tripod,

  ready for the next arrow.

  After I carried the mouse by the tail

  to a pile of leaves in the woods,

  I found myself standing at the bathroom sink

  gazing down affectionately at the soap,

  so patient and soluble,

  so at home in its pale green soap dish.

  I could feel myself falling again

  as I felt its turning in my wet hands

  and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

  Absence

  This morning as low clouds

  skidded over the spires of the city

  I found next to a bench

  in a park an ivory chess piece—

  the white knight as it turned out—

  and in the pigeon-ruffling wind

  I wondered where all the others were,

  lined up somewhere

  on their red and black squares,

  many of them feeling uneasy

  about the salt shaker

  that was taking his place,

  and all of them secretly longing

  for the moment

  when the white horse

  would reappear out of nowhere

  and advance toward the board

  with his distinctive motion,

  stepping forward, then sideways

  before advancing again,

  the same moves I was making him do

  over and over in the sunny field of my palm.

  Royal Aristocrat

  My old typewriter used to make so much noise

  I had to put a cushion of newspaper

  beneath it late at night

  so as not to wake the whole house.

  Even if I closed the study door

  and typed a few words at a time—

  the best way to work anyway—

  the clatter of keys was still so loud

  that the gray and yellow bird

/>   would wince in its cage.

  Some nights I could even see the moon

  frowning down at me through the winter trees.

  That was twenty years ago,

  yet as I write this with my soft lead pencil

  I can still hear that distinctive sound,

  like small arms fire across a border,

  one burst after another

  as my wife turned in her sleep.

  I was a single monkey

  trying to type the opening lines of my Hamlet,

  often doing nothing more

  than ironing pieces of paper in the platen

  then wrinkling them into balls

  to flick into the wicker basket.

  Still, at least I was making noise,

  adding to the great secretarial din,

  that chorus of clacking and bells,

  thousands of desks receding into the past.

  And that was more than can be said

  for the mute rooms of furniture,

  the speechless cruets of oil and vinegar,

  and the tall silent hedges surrounding the house.

  Such deep silence on those nights—

  just the sound of my typing

  and a few stars singing a song their mother

  sang when they were mere babies in the sky.

  Paris

  In the apartment someone gave me,

  the bathroom looked out on a little garden

  at the bottom of an air shaft

  with a few barely sprouting trees,

  ivy clinging to the white cinder blocks,

  a blue metal table and a rusted chair

  where, it would seem, no one had ever sat.

  Every morning, a noisy bird

  would flutter down between the buildings,

  perch on a thin branch and yell at me

  in French bird-talk

  while I soaked in the tub

  under the light from the pale translucent ceiling.

  And while he carried on, I would lie there

  in the warm soapy water