Picnic, Lightning Read online

  No moment was given there

  spacious enough

  to brake or swerve within,

  only time enough to keep my line,

  hoping without hope,

  knowing, as I needled through the instant,

  that the two of us had always been meant to meet here,

  my curved line crossing his

  as on some unknowable graph

  spread out on a vast table

  under the glare of a hanging lamp—

  a relentless diagram,

  millions of faint red lines

  forming millions of tiny squares.

  Reincarnation and You

  To come back at all would be outlandish enough,

  let alone to return as something else,

  yet most are quick with a preference

  for animals, usually, birds

  fluttering at the top of the list

  pursued by jaguars and cheetahs,

  sometimes a peacock

  but never an ant, never a snail,

  despite the quiet modesty of their lives.

  Once around is enough for me

  though whenever you ask

  I come up with something, a waterfall

  or the ferns quivering in its spray.

  An enormous piano, I will say one day,

  and the next a puddle in a sunny

  tropical village after a week of rain.

  Or I will pick a lime for the fun of it

  and hang there all day in the Florida sun

  trying to make death appear as easy

  as you make it sound

  when you stand by the pearl gray windows

  and explain your life as the lapdog of a duchess.

  But never mind all that,

  never mind the elephant-headed god

  and the transmigration of souls.

  Forget the rings of time

  and the abandonment of desire.

  Come closer. Look me in the eye.

  Tell me what kind

  of animal you want to be today,

  and I will whisper in your ear

  what I really want to be, come to think of it,

  now that all the sun has drained

  out of this room and neither one of us

  has thought to put on a lamp—

  a zoo in a lost city,

  one that can be entered or left

  only by crossing a range of mountains

  covered with deep snow, all year round.

  Jazz and Nature

  It was another clear sunny morning,

  a dry breeze agitating the trees around the house,

  and I had nothing on tap—

  my usual scene in late August.

  I was reading the autobiography

  of Art Pepper, so I put on an Art Pepper album

  and switched on the outdoor speakers

  so I could sit outside in the hot sun,

  and read more about his life of junk and prison

  while I listened to his speedy, mellow alto

  pouring out of two big maples

  as if West Coast jazz were the music of Nature itself.

  In this way, I drew a kind of box

  around the morning,

  in three dimensions and in pencil

  with me inside it holding a ruler in my hand.

  I read and listened and read

  and sometimes flipped to the photographs

  to check the face of the man

  who told me he once drove a greenish gold Cadillac

  that you could see forever into, like looking into a lake;

  the man who said he composed

  a ballad called “Diane” for his second wife

  only to realize later

  that the tune was way too beautiful for her.

  The fellow who admitted to selling

  his dog, a champagne poodle named Bijou,

  for a twenty-dollar score

  and who mentioned that men in prison

  who were trying to kick would tuck

  their pant legs into their socks

  so the slightest breeze would not touch their skin.

  Behind where I was sitting in the sun

  was an outbreak of wild pink phlox,

  and some of the bees nuzzling there

  started to hum around my head.

  One bee in particular seemed so curious

  about me I took a swipe at him,

  stood up suddenly and said “Don't mess with me

  and I won't mess with you, you little punk,”

  a remark no doubt inspired

  by my reading about California lowlife

  in nineteen fifty-seven,

  my all-time favorite year for jazz, as it happens.

  But he persisted, this bee, and finally

  drove me inside to the cool, dark study

  where a cat was sleeping on a chair,

  a good place to write this down

  and wonder what the rest of the day would hold—

  maybe hanging a print on the wall

  or getting a surprise phone call

  from someone I used to love.

  How about some Dexter Gordon

  around the cocktail hour,

  and who knows?

  perhaps an encounter with a vicious ant—

  all likely parts of my own autobiography,

  a more cautious tale, told in the present tense,

  with a few crude illustrations

  and a diagram of a small family tree,

  the work whose pages are turned

  every day like a wheel that is turned by water,

  the thing I can never stop writing,

  the only book I can never put down.

  And His Sextet

  Now that all the twilight has seeped

  out of the room

  and I am alone here listening,

  the bass is beginning to sound

  like my father

  ascending the flights of stairs

  every weekday evening,

  always the same cadence,

  a beat you could build a city on.

  And the alto is the woman

  I sat next to on a train

  who wore a tiny silver watch around her wrist.

  The drums are drops of water

  on my forehead,

  one for every inhabitant of China.

  And the tenor, let us say,

  is someone's younger brother

  who moved out West and never writes,

  or the tenor is a pair of aces

  lost in the desert,

  a black valentine,

  or a swan passing under a willow.

  But the piano—

  the piano is the piano

  you gave me one Christmas,

  a big black curve

  standing at the end of the room

  with a red bow tied around its leg

  and snow falling on the house

  and the row of hemlocks.

  And though by now I know some chords

  and a few standards,

  I still love lying on the floor

  like this, eyes closed,

  hands behind my head,

  pouring forth the solo on “Out of the Blue”

  in the Fantasy Studios,

  Berkeley, California,

  on October 4th, 1951.

  Where I Live

  The house sits at one end of a two-acre trapezoid.

  There is a wide lawn, a long brick path,

  rhododendrons, and large, heavy maples.

  Behind the geometry of the nine rooms,

  the woods run up a hillside;

  and across the road in front

  is a stream called the Plum Brook.

  It must have flowed through an orchard

  that no longer exists.

  Tomorrow early, I will drive down

  and talk to the stonecutter,

  but today I am staying home,

 
standing at one window, then another,

  or putting on a jacket

  and wandering around outside

  or sitting in a chair

  watching the trees full of light-green buds

  under the low hood of the sky.

  This is the first good rain to fall

  since my father was buried last week,

  and even though he was very old,

  I am amazed at how the small drops

  stream down the panes of glass,

  as usual,

  gathering,

  as they always have,

  in pools on the ground.

  My Life

  Sometimes I see it as a straight line

  drawn with a pencil and a ruler

  transecting the circle of the world

  or as a finger piercing

  a smoke ring, casual, inquisitive,

  but then the sun will come out

  or the phone will ring

  and I will cease to wonder

  if it is one thing,

  a large ball of air and memory,

  or many things,

  a string of small farming towns,

  a dark road winding through them.

  Let us say it is a field

  I have been hoeing every day,

  hoeing and singing,

  then going to sleep in one of its furrows,

  or now that it is more than half over,

  a partially open door,

  rain dripping from the eaves.

  Like yours, it could be anything,

  a nest with one egg,

  a hallway that leads to a thousand rooms—

  whatever happens to float into view

  when I close my eyes

  or look out a window

  for more than a few minutes,

  so that some days I think

  it must be everything and nothing at once.

  But this morning, sitting up in bed,

  wearing my black sweater and my glasses,

  the curtains drawn and the windows up,

  I am a lake, my poem is an empty boat,

  and my life is the breeze that blows

  through the whole scene

  stirring everything it touches—

  the surface of the water, the limp sail,

  even the heavy, leafy trees along the shore.

  Aristotle

  This is the beginning.

  Almost anything can happen.

  This is where you find

  the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,

  the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.

  Think of an egg, the letter A,

  a woman ironing on a bare stage

  as the heavy curtain rises.

  This is the very beginning.

  The first-person narrator introduces himself,

  tells us about his lineage.

  The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.

  Here the climbers are studying a map

  or pulling on their long woolen socks.

  This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.

  The profile of an animal is being smeared

  on the wall of a cave,

  and you have not yet learned to crawl.

  This is the opening, the gambit,

  a pawn moving forward an inch.

  This is your first night with her,

  your first night without her.

  This is the first part

  where the wheels begin to turn,

  where the elevator begins its ascent,

  before the doors lurch apart.

  This is the middle.

  Things have had time to get complicated,

  messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.

  Cities have sprouted up along the rivers

  teeming with people at cross-purposes—

  a million schemes, a million wild looks.

  Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack

  here and pitches his ragged tent.

  This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,

  where the action suddenly reverses

  or swerves off in an outrageous direction.

  Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph

  to why Miriam does not want Edward's child.

  Someone hides a letter under a pillow.

  Here the aria rises to a pitch,

  a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.

  And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge

  halfway up the mountain.

  This is the bridge, the painful modulation.

  This is the thick of things.

  So much is crowded into the middle—

  the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,

  Russian uniforms, noisy parties,

  lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall—

  too much to name, too much to think about.

  And this is the end,

  the car running out of road,

  the river losing its name in an ocean,

  the long nose of the photographed horse

  touching the white electronic line.

  This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,

  the empty wheelchair,

  and pigeons floating down in the evening.

  Here the stage is littered with bodies,

  the narrator leads the characters to their cells,

  and the climbers are in their graves.

  It is me hitting the period

  and you closing the book.

  It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen

  and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.

  This is the final bit

  thinning away to nothing.

  This is the end, according to Aristotle,

  what we have all been waiting for,

  what everything comes down to,

  the destination we cannot help imagining,

  a streak of light in the sky,

  a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgments are due to the editors of the following publications where many of these poems first appeared: The American Poetry Review (“Shoveling Snow with Buddha”); The American Scholar (“Duck/Rabbit,” “Paradelle for Susan”); The Berkeley Poetry Review (“Afternoon with Irish Cows”); Black Warrior Review (“I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of ‘Three Blind Mice’”); Brilliant Corners (“And His Sextet,” “Snow”); Crab Orchard Review (“Journal”); DoubleTake (“Jazz and Nature”); Field (“Some Days,” “Silence”); Five Points (“Fishing on the Susquehanna in July”); The Georgia Review (“Japan,” “Bonsai”); The Kenyon Review (“The Night House”); The New England Review (“Reincarnation and You”); The Paris Review (“Aristotle,” “Picnic, Lightning,” “Musée des Beaux Arts Revisited”); Plum Review (“After the Storm,” “The Death of the Hat,” “The List of Ancient Pastimes,” “Moon,” “This Much I Do Remember”); Poetry (“I Go Back to the House for a Book,” “In the Room of a Thousand Miles,” “Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey,” “Lines Lost Among Trees,” “Marginalia,” “Morning,” “My Life,” “Serpentine,” “Splitting Wood,” “What I Learned Today”); Poetry East (“Looking West”); Poetry International (“Home Again”); Western Humanities Review (“Victoria's Secret”); Wordsmith (“Where I Live”).

  “Lines Lost Among Trees” appeared in The Best American Poetry 1997, edited by James Tate.

  “Japan” appeared in The 1997 Pushcart Prize XXI.

  A grant from the Research Foundation of The City University of New York facilitated the preparation of this book.

  About the Author

  Billy Collins is professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, American Scholar, Harper's, and many other magazines. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowmen
t for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Questions About Angels was a winner of the National Poetry Series publication prize. Picnic, Lightning is his sixth collection of poetry. He lives in Somers, New York.