Picnic, Lightning Read online

  PITT POETRY SERIES

  Ed Ochester, Editor

  PICNIC, LIGHTNING

  Billy Collins

  UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

  The publication of this book is supported by a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

  Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15261

  Copyright © 1998, Billy Collins

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Printed on acid-free paper

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLI CATION DATA

  Collins, Billy.

  Picnic, lightning / Billy Collins.

  p. cm.— (Pitt poetry series)

  ISBN 0-8229-4066-3 (acid-free paper).—

  ISBN 0-8229-5970-5 (pbk. : acid-free paper).

  I Title. II. Series.

  PS3553.047478P52 1998

  811'. 54—dc21 97–33955

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-9105-2 (electronic)

  To the memory of Katherine Collins (1901–1997)

  Contents

  A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal

  I

  Fishing on the Susquehanna in July

  To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now

  I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of “Three Blind Mice”

  Afternoon with Irish Cows

  Marginalia

  What I Learned Today

  Journal

  Some Days

  Silence

  Picnic, Lightning

  II

  In the Room of a Thousand Miles

  Morning

  Bonsai

  Splitting Wood

  Shoveling Snow with Buddha

  I Go Back to the House for a Book

  After the Storm

  Snow

  Moon

  Looking West

  This Much I Do Remember

  Japan

  III

  Victoria's Secret

  Musée des Beaux Art Revisited

  Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey

  Paradelle for Susan

  Duck/Rabbit

  Egypt

  Home Again

  Lines Lost Among Trees

  The Many Faces of Jazz

  Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes

  IV

  The Night House

  The Death of the Hat

  The List of Ancient Pastimes

  Passengers

  Serpentine

  Reincarnation and You

  Jazz and Nature

  And His Sextet

  Where I Live

  My Life

  Aristotle

  Acknowledgments

  PICNIC, LIGHTNING

  “We spend our life trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench.”

  Beckett, Texts for Nothing

  A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal

  “A poet…never speaks directly,

  as to someone at the breakfast table.”

  —Yeats

  Every morning I sit across from you

  at the same small table,

  the sun all over the breakfast things—

  curve of a blue-and-white pitcher,

  a dish of berries—

  me in a sweatshirt or robe,

  you invisible.

  Most days, we are suspended

  over a deep pool of silence.

  I stare straight through you

  or look out the window at the garden,

  the powerful sky,

  a cloud passing behind a tree.

  There is no need to pass the toast,

  the pot of jam,

  or pour you a cup of tea,

  and I can hide behind the paper,

  rotate in its drum of calamitous news.

  But some days I may notice

  a little door swinging open

  in the morning air,

  and maybe the tea leaves

  of some dream will be stuck

  to the china slope of the hour—

  then I will lean forward,

  elbows on the table,

  with something to tell you,

  and you will look up, as always,

  your spoon dripping milk, ready to listen.

  I

  Fishing on the Susquehanna in July

  I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna

  or on any river for that matter

  to be perfectly honest.

  Not in July or any month

  have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure—

  of fishing on the Susquehanna.

  I am more likely to be found

  in a quiet room like this one—

  a painting of a woman on the wall,

  a bowl of tangerines on the table—

  trying to manufacture the sensation

  of fishing on the Susquehanna.

  There is little doubt

  that others have been fishing

  on the Susquehanna,

  rowing upstream in a wooden boat,

  sliding the oars under the water

  then raising them to drip in the light.

  But the nearest I have ever come to

  fishing on the Susquehanna

  was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia

  when I balanced a little egg of time

  in front of a painting

  in which that river curled around a bend

  under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,

  dense trees along the banks,

  and a fellow with a red bandanna

  sitting in a small, green

  flat-bottom boat

  holding the thin whip of a pole.

  That is something I am unlikely

  ever to do, I remember

  saying to myself and the person next to me.

  Then I blinked and moved on

  to other American scenes

  of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,

  even one of a brown hare

  who seemed so wired with alertness

  I imagined him springing right out of the frame.

  To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now

  “I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now.”

  Mary Oliver

  Nobody here likes a wet dog.

  No one wants anything to do with a dog

  that is wet from being out in the rain

  or retrieving a stick from a lake.

  Look how she wanders around the crowded pub tonight

  going from one person to another

  hoping for a pat on the head, a rub behind the ears,

  something that could be given with one hand

  without even wrinkling the conversation.

  But everyone pushes her away,

  some with a knee, others with the sole of a boot.

  Even the children, who don't realize she is wet

  until they go to pet her,

  push her away

  then wipe their hands on their clothes.

  And whenever she heads toward me,

  I show her my palm, and she turns aside.

  O stranger of the future!

  O inconceivable being!

  whatever the shape of your house,

  however you scoot from place to place,

  no matter how strange and colorless the clothes you may wear,

  I bet nobody there likes a wet dog either.

  I bet everybody in
your pub,

  even the children, pushes her away.

  I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of “Three Blind Mice”

  And I start wondering how they came to be blind.

  If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sisters,

  and I think of the poor mother

  brooding over her sightless young triplets.

  Or was it a common accident, all three caught

  in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?

  If not,

  if each came to his or her blindness separately,

  how did they ever manage to find one another?

  Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse

  to locate even one fellow mouse with vision

  let alone two other blind ones?

  And how, in their tiny darkness,

  could they possibly have run after a farmer's wife

  or anyone else's wife for that matter?

  Not to mention why.

  Just so she could cut off their tails

  with a carving knife, is the cynic's answer,

  but the thought of them without eyes

  and now without tails to trail through the moist grass

  or slip around the corner of a baseboard

  has the cynic who always lounges within me

  up off his couch and at the window

  trying to hide the rising softness that he feels.

  By now I am on to dicing an onion

  which might account for the wet stinging

  in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard's

  mournful trumpet on “Blue Moon,”

  which happens to be the next cut,

  cannot be said to be making matters any better.

  Afternoon with Irish Cows

  There were a few dozen who occupied the field

  across the road from where we lived,

  stepping all day from tuft to tuft,

  their big heads down in the soft grass,

  though I would sometimes pass a window

  and look out to see the field suddenly empty

  as if they had taken wing, flown off to another county.

  Then later, I would open the blue front door,

  and again the field would be full of their munching,

  or they would be lying down

  on the black and white maps of their sides,

  facing in all directions, waiting for rain.

  How mysterious, how patient and dumbfounded

  they appeared in the long quiet of the afternoons.

  But every once in a while, one of them

  would let out a sound so phenomenal

  that I would put down the paper

  or the knife I was cutting an apple with

  and walk across the road to the stone wall

  to see which one of them was being torched

  or pierced through the side with a long spear.

  Yes, it sounded like pain until I could see

  the noisy one, anchored there on all fours,

  her neck outstretched, her bellowing head

  laboring upward as she gave voice

  to the rising, full-bodied cry

  that began in the darkness of her belly

  and echoed up through her bowed ribs into her gaping mouth.

  Then I knew that she was only announcing

  the large, unadulterated cowness of herself,

  pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind

  to all the green fields and the gray clouds,

  to the limestone hills and the inlet of the blue bay,

  while she regarded my head and shoulders

  above the wall with one wild, shocking eye.

  Marginalia

  Sometimes the notes are ferocious,

  skirmishes against the author

  raging along the borders of every page

  in tiny black script.

  If I could just get my hands on you,

  Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,

  they seem to say,

  I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

  Other comments are more offhand, dismissive—

  “Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!”—

  that kind of thing.

  I remember once looking up from my reading,

  my thumb as a bookmark,

  trying to imagine what the person must look like

  who wrote “Don't be a ninny”

  alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

  Students are more modest

  needing to leave only their splayed footprints

  along the shore of the page.

  One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot's.

  Another notes the presence of “Irony”

  fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

  Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,

  hands cupped around their mouths.

  “Absolutely,” they shout

  to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.

  “Yes.” “Bull's-eye.” “My man!”

  Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points

  rain down along the sidelines.

  And if you have managed to graduate from college

  without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”

  in a margin, perhaps now

  is the time to take one step forward.

  We have all seized the white perimeter as our own

  and reached for a pen if only to show

  we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;

  we pressed a thought into the wayside,

  planted an impression along the verge.

  Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria

  jotted along the borders of the Gospels

  brief asides about the pains of copying,

  a bird singing near their window,

  or the sunlight that illuminated their page—

  anonymous men catching a ride into the future

  on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

  And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,

  they say, until you have read him

  enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

  Yet the one I think of most often,

  the one that dangles from me like a locket,

  was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye

  I borrowed from the local library

  one slow, hot summer.

  I was just beginning high school then,

  reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,

  and I cannot tell you

  how vastly my loneliness was deepened,

  how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,

  when I found on one page

  a few greasy looking smears

  and next to them, written in soft pencil—

  by a beautiful girl, I could tell,

  whom I would never meet—

  “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”

  What I Learned Today

  I had never heard of John Bernard Flannagan,

  American sculptor,

  until I found him on page 961

  of the single-volume encyclopedia I am reading

  at the rate of one page each day.

  He was so poor, according to the entry,

  he could not afford the good, quarried marble

  and instead had to carve animals

  out of the fieldstones he gathered

  until he committed suicide in 1942,

  the year, I can't help thinking, I turned one.

  Of course I know what flannel is,

  but that French flannel is napped on only one side

  is new to me and a reminder that

  no matter what the size the aquarium of one's learning,

  another colored pebble can always be dropped in.

  Tonight a fog blows by the windows,

  and a mist falls throug
h the porch lights

  as my index finger descends from flat-coated retriever,

  to flatfish, those sideways creatures—

  turbot, plaice, flounder, sole—

  all swimming through the dark with close-set eyes,

  toothless, twisted mouths,

  and a preference for warm, shallow water.

  But this is nothing new to me.

  No dots are connected in the vast grid

  of my autodidacticism.

  No branch is pruned in the forest of my ignorance,

  which is why I am stepping over the Flathead River

  of Canada and Montana's Flathead Lake

  and coming to rest on the Flathead Indians

  who never actually practiced head-flattening,

  I am disappointed to learn,

  but got their name from neighboring tribes

  who shaped the fronts of their own heads

  to achieve a pointed appearance,

  which is how I hope to look

  when the entire contents of this book

  press against the inside of my high forehead.

  What a relief to emerge

  from all this flatheadedness and land on

  Flaubert, son of a surgeon, victim of a nervous

  disorder, and pursuer of le mot juste.

  Yet the entry for the supreme master of the realistic novel

  is no taller than a filtered cigarette

  and hardly half the size of the piscatory word-puff

  that envelops the subject of flatfish.

  Posterity is, indeed, a cruel and savagely attired mistress,

  but my own slow, sentimental education

  must continue with the revelation

  that while there were three emperors and

  a Catholic patriarch all named Flavian,

  there is only one Dan Flavin, another sculptor,

  who works, the bottom of the narrow column tells me,

  in the medium of fluorescent lights,

  luminous tubes, strangely configured.

  The hour is late as I mark my place

  with a playing card and close the book in my lap.

  A cool vapor flows over the windowsills.

  Appalachia is behind me, Napoleon lies ahead,

  and I will save for tomorrow the subject of flax

  (the chief source of fiber and seed oil

  from prehistoric times to the development of cotton).

  It is time to float on the waters of the night.

  Time to wrap my arms around this book

  and press it to my chest, life preserver

  in a sea of unremarkable men and women,