Questions About Angels Read online

  PITT POETRY SERIES

  Ed Ochester, Editor

  Questions About Angels

  POEMS

  Billy Collins

  University of Pittsburgh Press

  Published 1999 by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15261

  Originally published by William Morrow and Company, Inc.

  Copyright © 1991, Billy Collins

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Printed on acid-free paper

  10 9

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Collins, Billy.

  Questions about angels : poems / Billy Collins.

  p. cm. — (Pitt poetry series)

  ISBN 0-8229-5698-5 (alk. paper)

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PS3553.047478Q47 1999

  811'.54—dc21 98-45376

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-7934-0 (electronic)

  for Diane

  CONTENTS

  1.

  American Sonnet

  A History of Weather

  First Reader

  Student of Clouds

  Candle Hat

  The Death of Allegory

  Reading Myself to Sleep

  The Norton Anthology of English Literature

  The Hunt

  Forgetfulness

  2.

  Questions About Angels

  A Wonder of the World

  Mappamundi

  The First Geniuses

  The Afterlife

  The Dead

  Endangered

  Going Out for Cigarettes

  3.

  Purity

  Cliché

  Field Guide

  Putti in the Night

  The Man in the Moon

  Horseman, Pass By!

  Memento Mori

  The Last Man on Earth

  Come Running

  Modern Peasant

  Instructions to the Artist

  Weighing the Dog

  One Life to Live

  The Wires of the Night

  Axiom

  Vade Mecum

  Not Touching

  Night Sand

  Love in the Sahara

  Invective

  4.

  The Life of Riley: A Definitive Biography

  Jack

  Metamorphosis

  Saturday Morning

  Late Show

  Pie Man

  Wolf

  The History Teacher

  Pensée

  The Discovery of Scat

  Dog

  The Willies

  On Reading in the Morning Paper That Dreams May Be Only Nonsense

  Rip Van Winkle

  English Country House

  Nostalgia

  Acknowledgments

  1

  American Sonnet

  We do not speak like Petrarch or wear a hat like Spenser

  and it is not fourteen lines

  like furrows in a small, carefully plowed field

  but the picture postcard, a poem on vacation,

  that forces us to sing our songs in little rooms

  or pour our sentiments into measuring cups.

  We write on the back of a waterfall or lake,

  adding to the view a caption as conventional

  as an Elizabethan woman's heliocentric eyes.

  We locate an adjective for the weather.

  We announce that we are having a wonderful time.

  We express the wish that you were here

  and hide the wish that we were where you are,

  walking back from the mailbox, your head lowered

  as you read and turn the thin message in your hands.

  A slice of this place, a length of white beach,

  a piazza or carved spires of a cathedral

  will pierce the familiar place where you remain,

  and you will toss on the table this reversible display:

  a few square inches of where we have strayed

  and a compression of what we feel.

  A History of Weather

  It is the kind of spring morning—candid sunlight

  elucidating the air, a flower-ruffling breeze—

  that makes me want to begin a history of weather,

  a ten-volume elegy for the atmospheres of the past,

  the envelopes that have moved around the moving globe.

  It will open by examining the cirrus clouds

  that are now sweeping over this house into the next state,

  and every chapter will step backwards in time

  to illustrate the rain that fell on battlefields

  and the winds that attended beheadings, coronations.

  The snow flurries of Victorian London will be surveyed

  along with the gales that blew off Renaissance caps.

  The tornadoes of the Middle Ages will be explicated

  and the long, overcast days of the Dark Ages.

  There will be a section on the frozen nights of antiquity

  and on the heat that shimmered in the deserts of the Bible.

  The study will be hailed as ambitious and definitive,

  for it will cover even the climate before the Flood

  when showers moistened Eden and will conclude

  with the mysteries of the weather before history

  when unseen clouds drifted over an unpeopled world,

  when not a soul lay in any of earth's meadows gazing up

  at the passing of enormous faces and animal shapes,

  his jacket bunched into a pillow, an open book on his chest.

  First Reader

  I can see them standing politely on the wide pages

  that I was still learning to turn,

  Jane in a blue jumper, Dick with his crayon-brown hair,

  playing with a ball or exploring the cosmos

  of the backyard, unaware they are the first characters,

  the boy and girl who begin fiction.

  Beyond the simple illustration of their neighborhood

  the other protagonists were waiting in a huddle:

  frightening Heathcliff, frightened Pip, Nick Adams

  carrying a fishing rod. Emma Bovary riding into Rouen.

  But I would read about the perfect boy and his sister

  even before I would read about Adam and Eve, garden and gate,

  and before I heard the name Gutenberg, the type

  of their simple talk was moving into my focusing eyes.

  It was always Saturday and he and she

  were always pointing at something and shouting “Look!”

  pointing at the dog, the bicycle, or at their father

  as he pushed a hand mower over the lawn,

  waving at aproned mother framed in the kitchen doorway,

  pointing toward the sky, pointing at each other.

  They wanted us to look but we had looked already

  and seen the shaded lawn, the wagon, the postman.

  We had seen the dog, walked, watered and fed the animal,

  and now it was time to discover the infinite, clicking

  permutations of the alphabet's small and capital letters.

  Alphabetical ourselves in the rows of classroom desks,

  we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read.

  Student of Clouds

  The emotion is to be found in the clouds,

  not in the green solids of the sloping hills

  or even in the gray signatures of rivers,

  according to Constable, who was a student of clouds

  and filled shelves of sketchbooks with their motion,

  their lofty gesturing and sudden implicati
on of weather.

  Outdoors, he must have looked up thousands of times,

  his pencil trying to keep pace with their high voyaging

  and the silent commotion of their eddying and flow.

  Clouds would move beyond the outlines he would draw

  as they moved within themselves, tumbling into their centers

  and swirling off at the burning edges in vapors

  to dissipate into the universal blue of the sky.

  In photographs we can stop all this movement now

  long enough to tag them with their Latin names.

  Cirrus, nimbus, stratocumulus—

  dizzying, romantic, authoritarian—

  they bear their titles over the schoolhouses below

  where their shapes and meanings are memorized.

  High on the soft blue canvases of Constable

  they are stuck in pigment but his clouds appear

  to be moving still in the wind of his brush,

  inching out of England and the nineteenth century

  and sailing over these meadows where I am walking,

  bareheaded beneath this cupola of motion,

  my thoughts arranged like paint on a high blue ceiling.

  Candle Hat

  In most self-portraits it is the face that dominates:

  Cézanne is a pair of eyes swimming in brushstrokes,

  Van Gogh stares out of a halo of swirling darkness,

  Rembrandt looks relieved as if he were taking a breather

  from painting The Blinding of Samson.

  But in this one Goya stands well back from the mirror

  and is seen posed in the clutter of his studio

  addressing a canvas tilted back on a tall easel.

  He appears to be smiling out at us as if he knew

  we would be amused by the extraordinary hat on his head

  which is fitted around the brim with candle holders,

  a device that allowed him to work into the night.

  You can only wonder what it would be like

  to be wearing such a chandelier on your head

  as if you were a walking dining room or concert hall.

  But once you see this hat there is no need to read

  any biography of Goya or to memorize his dates.

  To understand Goya you only have to imagine him

  lighting the candles one by one, then placing

  the hat on his head, ready for a night of work.

  Imagine him surprising his wife with his new invention,

  then laughing like a birthday cake when she saw the glow.

  Imagine him flickering through the rooms of his house

  with all the shadows flying across the walls.

  Imagine a lost traveler knocking on his door

  one dark night in the hill country of Spain.

  “Come in,” he would say, “I was just painting myself,”

  as he stood in the doorway holding up the wand of a brush,

  illuminated in the blaze of his famous candle hat.

  The Death of Allegory

  I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions

  that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings

  and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance

  displaying their capital letters like license plates.

  Truth cantering on a powerful horse,

  Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils.

  Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat,

  Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended,

  Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall,

  Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm.

  They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes.

  Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator.

  Valor lies in bed listening to the rain.

  Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood,

  and all their props are locked away in a warehouse,

  hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles.

  Even if you called them back, there are no places left

  for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss.

  The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums

  and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair.

  Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies

  and next to it black binoculars and a money clip,

  exactly the kind of thing we now prefer,

  objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case,

  themselves and nothing more, a wheelbarrow,

  an empty mailbox, a razor blade resting in a glass ashtray.

  As for the others, the great ideas on horseback

  and the long-haired virtues in embroidered gowns,

  it looks as though they have traveled down

  that road you see on the final page of storybooks,

  the one that winds up a green hillside and disappears

  into an unseen valley where everyone must be fast asleep.

  Reading Myself to Sleep

  The house is all in darkness except for this corner bedroom

  where the lighthouse of a table lamp is guiding

  my eyes through the narrow channels of print,

  and the only movement in the night is the slight

  swirl of curtains, the easy lift and fall of my breathing,

  and the flap of pages as they turn in the wind of my hand.

  Is there a more gentle way to go into the night

  than to follow an endless rope of sentences

  and then to slip drowsily under the surface of a page

  into the first tentative flicker of a dream,

  passing out of the bright precincts of attention

  like cigarette smoke passing through a window screen?

  All late readers know this sinking feeling of falling

  into the liquid of sleep and then rising again

  to the call of a voice that you are holding in your hands,

  as if pulled from the sea back into a boat

  where a discussion is raging on some subject or other,

  on Patagonia or Thoroughbreds or the nature of war.

  Is there a better method of departure by night

  than this quiet bon voyage with an open book,

  the sole companion who has come to see you off,

  to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?

  I can hear the rush and sweep of fallen leaves outside

  where the world lies unconscious, and I can feel myself

  dissolving, drifting into a story that will never be written,

  letting the book slip to the floor where I will find it

  in the morning when I surface, wet and streaked with daylight.

  The Norton Anthology of English Literature

  It is easy to find out if a poet is a contemporary poet

  and thus avoid the imbroglio of calling him Victorian

  or worse, Elizabethan, or worse yet, medieval.

  If you look him up in The Norton Anthology of English Literature

  and the year of his birth is followed only by a dash

  and a small space for the numerals only spirits know,

  then it is safe to say that he is probably alive,

  perhaps out walking in a pale coat, inhaling the night air,

  alive and contemporary as he lights a cigarette

  and the smoke billows forth like an amorphous thought

  dissipating over the cold, barge-heavy river he is staring into.

  But if the dash in the book is followed by another year,

  he is not contemporary; perhaps he is nothing at all

  save what remains on the few pages there for you to read

  and maybe read over again, read aloud to an empty room.

  Did you know that it is possible if you read a poem

  enough times, if you read it over and over without stopping,


  that you can make the author begin to spin gently,

  even affectionately, in his grave?

  History is busy tonight in the freezing cemetery

  carving death dates in stone with a hammer and chisel

  and closing those parentheses that are used to embrace our lives,

  as if we were afterthoughts dropped into a long sentence.

  In the light of all this, I am thankful that I can even see

  History standing there holding her allegorical tools.

  And I am amazed at how tall and solemn she looks

  and how immaculate are her robes.

  The Hunt

  Somewhere in the rolling hills and farm country

  that lie beyond speech

  Noah Webster and his assistants are moving

  across the landscape tracking down a new word.

  It is a small noun about the size of a mouse,

  one that will be seldom used by anyone,

  like a synonym for isthmus,

  but they are pursuing the creature zealously

  as if it were the verb to be,

  swinging their sticks and calling out to one another

  as they wade through a field of waist-high barley.

  Forgetfulness

  The name of the author is the first to go

  followed obediently by the title, the plot,

  the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel

  which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

  as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor

  decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,

  to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

  Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye

  and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,

  and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

  something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,

  the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

  Whatever it is you are struggling to remember

  it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,

  not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

  It has floated away down a dark mythological river

  whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,

  well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those