Ballistics Read online

  Praise for

  Ballistics and Billy Collins

  “Wryly philosophical, caustically whimsical, disarmingly beautiful, Collins’s covertly powerful lyrics deftly snare all that is fine and ludicrous about us.”

  —Booklist

  “Accessible and high-spirited … [Collins] again shows the deft, self-mocking touch that has made him one of America’s bestselling poets.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Collins] gives to ‘ordinary lives’ an eloquence that is far from ordinary but made from it nevertheless.”

  —The Buffalo News (Editor’s Choice)

  “Collins reveals the unexpected within the ordinary. He peels back the surface of the humdrum to make the moment new.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “By careful observation, Collins spins comic gold from the dross of quotidian suburban life.… Chipping away at the surface, he surprises you by scraping to the wood underneath, to some deeper truth.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “A poet of plentitude, irony, and Augustan grace.”

  —The New Yorker

  “It is difficult not to be charmed by Collins, and that in itself is a remarkable literary accomplishment.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “[Collins] moves you to laughter and tears, often during the course of one poem.… His insight into the human condition astonishes.”

  —Pages

  “Collins’s accessible and deeply human poetry would make a poetry lover out of anyone.”

  —Good Housekeeping

  “Collins uses ordinary words … and his sentences have the cadences of speech. They usually start with plain statements … then something strange happens. A rocket goes off, images burst out like fireworks, and life’s backyard becomes a magic kingdom.… Collins is often very funny—but more startling than the wit is the way his mind makes unexpected leaps and splices.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “To begin with, Collins is absolutely charming. He deserves every rose he’s flung these days.… His poems are irresistible.”

  —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

  “Collins has reached into so many unexplored corners that he has elevated the mundane, not out of proportion to the world, but to a place where it seems to have always belonged.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “Like a master jazz trumpeter, Collins takes quirky, imaginative leaps that are as stunning for their coherence as for their originality.… Collins’s popularity hinges on the accessibility of his poems and their mildly subversive quality.… So obviously a virtuoso, Billy Collins is sure to bring many new readers to poetry.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  ALSO BY BILLY COLLINS

  The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems

  Nine Horses

  Sailing Alone Around the Room

  Picnic, Lightning

  The Art of Drowning

  Questions About Angels

  The Apple That Astonished Paris

  Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (editor)

  180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (editor)

  2010 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2008 by Billy Collins

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Previous publication information about some of the poems contained within this work can be found beginning on this page.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2008.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Collins, Billy.

  Ballistics : poems / Billy Collins.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-763-1

  I. Title.

  PS3553.O47478B35 2008

  811′.54–dc22

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  For Chris Calhoun

  advocate and pal

  Even as a cow she was lovely.

  —Ovid, Metamorphoses

  contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Note to the Reader

  August in Paris

  one

  Brightly Colored Boats Upturned on the Banks of the Charles

  Searching

  High

  The Four-Moon Planet

  Evasive Maneuvers

  August

  The Poems of Others

  Aubade

  No Things

  The First Night

  January in Paris

  two

  Ballistics

  Pornography

  Greek and Roman Statuary

  Quiet

  Scenes of Hell

  Hippos on Holiday

  Carpe Diem

  Lost

  Dublin

  New Year’s Day

  The Day Lassie Died

  three

  Tension

  The Golden Years

  Vermont, Early November

  The Effort

  The Lamps Unlit

  China

  Looking Forward

  (detail)

  Le Chien

  Addendum

  On the Death of a Next-Door Neighbor

  Separation

  four

  Adage

  The Flight of the Statues

  Passivity

  Ornithography

  Baby Listening

  Bathtub Families

  Despair

  The Idea of Natural History at Key West

  The Fish

  A Dog on His Master

  The Great American Poem

  What Love Does

  Divorce

  Liu Yung

  This Little Piggy Went to Market

  Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant

  The Breather

  Oh, My God!

  The Mortal Coil

  The Future

  Envoy

  acknowledgments

  About the Author

  A Note to the Reader About this Poetry eBook

  The way a poem looks on the page is a vital aspect of its being. The length of its lines and the poet’s use of stanza breaks give the poem a physical shape, which guides our reading of the poem and distinguishes it from prose.

  With an eBook, this distinct shape may be altered if you choose to take advantage of one of the functions of your eReader by changing the size of the type for greater legibility. Doing this may cause the poem to have line breaks not intended by the poet. To preserve the physical integrity of the poem, we have formatted the eBook so that any words that get bumped down to a new line in the poem will be noticeably indented. This way, you can still appreciate the poem’s original shape regardless of your choice of type size.

  August in Paris

  I have stopped here on the rue des Écoles

  just off the boulevard St-Germain

  to look over the shoulder of a man

  in a flannel shirt and a straw hat

  who has set up an easel and a canvas chair

  on the sidewalk in order to paint from a droll angle

  a side-view of the Church of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

  But where are you, reader,

  who have not paused in your walk

  to look over my shoulder

  to see what I am jotting in this not
ebook?

  Alone in this city,

  I sometimes wonder what you look like,

  if you are wearing a flannel shirt

  or a wraparound blue skirt held together by a pin.

  But every time I turn around

  you have fled through a crease in the air

  to a quiet room where the shutters are closed

  against the heat of the afternoon,

  where there is only the sound of your breathing

  and every so often, the turning of a page.

  one

  Brightly Colored Boats Upturned

  on the Banks of the Charles

  What is there to say about them

  that has not been said in the title?

  I saw them near dawn from a glassy room

  on the other side of that river,

  which flowed from some hidden spring

  to the sea; but that is getting away from

  the brightly colored boats upturned

  on the banks of the Charles,

  the sleek racing sculls of a college crew team.

  They were beautiful in the clear early light—

  red, yellow, blue and green—

  is all I wanted to say about them,

  although for the rest of the day

  I pictured a lighter version of myself

  calling time through a little megaphone,

  first to the months of the year,

  then to the twelve apostles, all grimacing

  as they leaned and pulled on the long wooden oars.

  Searching

  I recall someone once admitting

  that all he remembered of Anna Karenina

  was something about a picnic basket,

  and now, after consuming a book

  devoted to the subject of Barcelona—

  its people, its history, its complex architecture—

  all I remember is the mention

  of an albino gorilla, the inhabitant of a park

  where the Citadel of the Bourbons once stood.

  The sheer paleness of her looms over

  all the notable names and dates

  as the evening strollers stop before her

  and point to show their children.

  These locals called her Snowflake,

  and here she has been mentioned again in print

  in the hope of keeping her pallid flame alive

  and helping her, despite her name, to endure

  in this poem where she has found another cage.

  Oh, Snowflake,

  I had no interest in the capital of Catalonia—

  its people, its history, its complex architecture—

  no, you were the reason

  I kept my light on late into the night

  turning all those pages, searching for you everywhere.

  High

  On that clear October morning,

  I was only behind a double espresso

  and a single hit of anti-depressant,

  yet there, on the shore of the reservoir

  with its flipped-over rowboats,

  I felt like I was walking with Jane Austen

  to borrow the jargon of the streets.

  Yes, I was wearing the crown,

  as the drug addicts like to say,

  knitting a bonnet for Charlie,

  entertaining the troops,

  sitting in the study with H. G. Wells—

  so many ways to express that mood

  of royal goodwill

  when the gift of sight is cause enough for jubilation.

  And later in the afternoon

  when I finally came down,

  a lexicon was waiting for me there, too.

  In my upholstered chair by a window

  with dusk pouring into the room,

  I appeared to be doing nothing,

  but inside I was busy riding the marble,

  as the lurkers like to put it,

  talking to Marco Polo,

  juggling turtles,

  going through the spin cycle,

  or—my favorite, if I had to have one—out of milk.

  The Four-Moon Planet

  I have envied the four-moon planet.

  —The Notebooks of Robert Frost

  Maybe he was thinking of the song

  “What a Little Moonlight Can Do”

  and became curious about

  what a lot of moonlight might be capable of.

  But wouldn’t this be too much of a good thing?

  and what if you couldn’t tell them apart

  and they always rose together

  like pale quadruplets entering a living room?

  Yes, there would be enough light

  to read a book or write a letter at midnight,

  and if you drank enough tequila

  you might see eight of them roving brightly above.

  But think of the two lovers on a beach,

  his arm around her bare shoulder,

  thrilled at how close they were feeling tonight

  while he gazed at one moon and she another.

  Evasive Maneuvers

  I grew up hiding from the other children.

  I would break off from the pack

  on its patrol of the streets every Saturday

  and end up alone behind a hedge

  or down a dim hallway in a strange basement.

  No one ever came looking for me,

  which only added to the excitement.

  I used to hide from adults, too,

  mostly behind my mother’s long coat

  or her floral dress depending on the season.

  I tried to learn how to walk

  between my father’s steps while he walked

  like the trick poodle I had seen on television.

  And I hid behind books,

  usually one of the volumes of the encyclopedia

  that was kept behind glass in a bookcase,

  the letters of the alphabet in gold.

  Before I knew how to read,

  I sat in an armchair in the living room

  and turned the pages, without a clue

  about the worlds that were pressed

  between D and F, M and O, W and Z.

  Maybe this explains why

  I looked out the bedroom window

  first thing this morning

  at the heavy trees, low gray clouds,

  and said the word gastropod out loud,

  and having no idea what it meant

  went downstairs and looked it up

  then hid in the woods from my wife and our dog.

  August

  The first one to rise on a Sunday morning,

  I enter the white bathroom

  trying not to think of Christ or Wallace Stevens.

  It’s before dawn and the road is quiet,

  even the birds are silent in the heat.

  And standing on the tile floor,

  I open a little nut of time

  and nod to the cold water faucet,

  with its chilled beaded surface

  for cooling my wrists and cleansing my face,

  and I offer some thanks

  to the electricity swirling in the lightbulbs

  for showing me the toothbrush and the bottle of aspirin.

  I went to grammar school for Jesus

  and to graduate school for Wallace Stevens.

  But right now, I want to consider

  only the water and the light,

  always ready to flow and spark at my touch,

  and beyond the wonders of this white room—

  the reservoir high in the mountains,

  the shore crowded with trees,

  and the dynamo housed in a colossus of brick,

  its bright interior, and up there,

  a workman smoking alone on a catwalk.

  The Poems of Others

  Is there no end to it

  the way they keep popping up in magazines

  then congregate in the
drafty orphanage of a book?

  You would think the elm would speak up,

  but like the dawn it only inspires—then more of them appear.

  Not even the government can put a stop to it.

  Just this morning, one approached me like a possum,

  snout twitching, impossible to ignore.

  Another looked out of the water at me like an otter.

  How can anyone dismiss them

  when they dangle from the eaves of houses

  and throw themselves in our paths?

  Perhaps I am being harsh, even ridiculous.

  It could have been the day at the zoo

  that put me this way—all the children by the cages—

  as if only my poems had the right to exist

  and people would come down from the hills

  in the evening to view them in rooms of white marble.

  So I will take the advice of the mentors

  and put this in a drawer for a week

  maybe even a year or two and then have a calmer look at it—

  but for now I am going to take a walk

  through this nearly silent neighborhood

  that is my winter resting place, my hibernaculum,

  and get my mind off the poems of others

  even as they peer down from the trees