The Rain in Portugal Read online

As usual, it was easy to accept the lake

  and its surroundings,

  to take at face value the thick reeds

  along the shore, a little platoon of ducks,

  a turtle sunning itself on a limb half submerged,

  and the big surface of the lake itself

  the water sometimes glassy, other times ruffled.

  Why, Henry David Thoreau or anyone

  even vaguely familiar with the role

  of the picturesque in 19th century

  American landscape painting

  would feel perfectly at home in its presence.

  And that is why I felt so relieved to discover

  in the midst of all this familiarity

  a note of skepticism,

  or call it a Dadaist paradox.

  And if not a remark worthy of Oscar Wilde

  then surely a sign of impertinence was here

  in the casual fuck-you attitude

  so perfectly expressed by the anhinga

  drying its extended wings

  in the morning breeze

  while perched on a decoy of a Canada goose.

  Solvitur Ambulando

  “It is solved by walking.”

  I sometimes wonder about the thoughtful Roman

  who came up with the notion

  that any problem can be solved by walking.

  Maybe his worries were minor enough

  to be banished by a little amble

  along the paths of his gardens,

  or, if he faced a tough one—

  whether to invite Lavinia or Pomponia to the feast—

  walking to the Coliseum would show him the one to pick.

  The maxim makes it sound so simple:

  go for a walk until you find a solution

  then walk back home with a clear head.

  No problem, as they used to say in ancient Rome.

  But one night, a sticky one might take you

  for a walk past the limits of a city,

  beyond the streetlights of its suburbs,

  and there you are, knocking on the door of a farmer,

  who keeps you company on the porch

  until your wife comes to fetch you

  and drive you and your problem back home,

  your problem taking up most of the back seat

  and staring at your wife in the rear-view mirror.

  And what about the mathematician

  who tried to figure out some devilish

  mind-crusher like Goldbach’s conjecture

  and taking the Latin to heart,

  walked to the very bottom of Patagonia?

  There he stood on a promontory,

  so the locals like to tell you,

  staring beyond the end of the hemisphere,

  with nothing but the cries of seabirds,

  waves exploding on the rocks,

  clouds rushing down the sky,

  and him having figured the whole thing out.

  Fire

  Is there anyone out there

  who can name a movie about a writer

  of the eighteenth or nineteenth century

  that does not feature a fireplace

  into whose manic flames are tossed,

  usually one at a time,

  the pages of a now lost literary masterpiece?

  The scene could be a manor house or a hovel,

  the fire doesn’t know the difference

  any more than it can distinguish a chit

  from a poem that could change the direction of literature.

  The culprit is usually a rival,

  or the wife, driven mad by neglect,

  or a mistress, her damp hair in tendrils,

  but the best destroyer of all is the author himself

  standing transfixed by the mantel

  as he undoes all the good he has ever done.

  And that is what I saw tonight

  here from my chair across the room—

  an actor playing Coleridge burning

  the fresh, hand-written pages of “Kubla Khan,”

  his drug-haunted face flickering above the flames.

  So far, I have been immune to such romance.

  All my good pages are right here on the desk.

  The only fire in this house is

  the pilot light burning in the kitchen.

  My wife kissed me and went to bed hours ago,

  and my only rival was killed in a duel

  on a snowy field somewhere in Russia

  one hundred and thirty-five years ago today.

  Bachelorette Party

  When you told me you’d been invited to one,

  I pictured a room full of tiny bachelors

  in miniature slacks and natty sports jackets

  and in the background a stack of boxes

  tied with bows, which one of them would get to open.

  But first they would have lots of drinks

  and clink their little glasses

  of peaty single-malt whiskeys

  and talk about cars and the sport of the season

  until a long awkward silence would set in

  and one of them would suggest they go out

  and look for some single women their size,

  leaving the badly wrapped presents unopened in a pile.

  And none of that would have occurred to me

  if there were a separate word for a party

  thrown for a woman looking forward

  to pulling a big white dress over her head,

  maybe a word from Hindi, or a brand new one,

  instead of just an old word with a suffix

  tied to its bumper along with a bunch of empty tin cans.

  Oh, Lonesome Me

  Again I woke up to no one’s smile

  unless you count the face

  formed by the closet doorknob,

  the tiny mouth of the keyhole

  looking comically surprised at its bulbous nose.

  It was Stephen Crane’s month

  on my Calendar of American Authors,

  but he was clearly not smiling,

  and my grandfather looked displeased

  at the frame I had chosen for his portrait.

  Not ornate enough, his eyes seemed to say.

  The lid on the piano was closed

  so I could not see its lavish smile,

  but then who comes gamboling to the rescue

  but Elsie the Cow, grinning broadly

  from her place on the carton of milk

  I was tipping into my bowl of cereal.

  Commendable is the constancy of her glee,

  sustained all through the night

  in the darkness of the refrigerator

  then unveiled in the sunny kitchen of morning.

  And encircling her head is a garland of daisies,

  woven no doubt by someone on the farm,

  who then entered the pasture

  and settled them around her magnificent neck.

  Likely, it’s the handiwork of a girl,

  maybe one of the daughters, perhaps an only child.

  But where is she now?

  When did she leave?

  And by what river or seashore does she dwell?

  Meditation

  I was sitting cross-legged one morning

  in our sunny new meditation room

  wondering if it would be okay

  to invite our out-of-town guest

  to Frank’s dinner party next weekend

  when it occurred to me

  that I wasn’t really meditating at all.

  In fact, I had never meditated

  in our sunny new meditation room.

  I had just sat cross-legged

  now and then for 15 or 20 minutes

  worrying about one thing or another,

  how the world will end

  or what to get Alice for her birthday.

  It would make more sense

  to rename the meditation room

&nbs
p; our new exercise room

  and to replace all the candles,

  incense holders, and the little statues

  with two ten-pound hand weights

  and a towel in case I broke a sweat.

  Then I pictured the new room

  with nothing in it but a folded white towel,

  and a pair of numbered hand weights—

  an image of such simplicity

  that the sustaining of it

  as I sat cross-legged under a tall window,

  my palms open weightlessly on my bare knees,

  made me wonder if I wasn’t actually

  meditating for a moment then and there

  in our former meditation room,

  where the sun seemed to be brightening

  as it suffused with light the grain

  in the planks of that room’s gleaming floor.

  Poem to the First Generation of People to Exist After the Death of the English Language

  I’m not going to put a lot of work into this

  because you won’t be able to read it anyway,

  and I’ve got more important things to do

  this morning, not the least of which

  is to try to write a fairly decent poem

  for the people who can still read English.

  Who could have foreseen English finding

  a place in the cemetery of dead languages?

  I once imagined English placing flowers

  at the tombstones of its parents, Latin and Anglo-Saxon,

  but you people can actually visit its grave

  on a Sunday afternoon if you still have days of the week.

  I remember the story of the last speaker

  of Dalmatian being tape-recorded in his hut

  as he was dying under a horse-hair blanket.

  But English? English seemed for so many of us

  the only true way to describe the world

  as if reality itself were English

  and Adam and Eve spoke it in the garden

  using words like snake, apple, and perdition.

  Of course, there are other words for things

  but what could be better than boat,

  pool, swallow (both the noun and the verb),

  statuette, tractor, squiggly, surf, and underbelly?

  I’m sorry.

  I’ve wasted too much time on this already.

  You carry on however you do

  without the help of English, communicating

  with dots in the air or hologram hats or whatever.

  You’re just like all the ones who say

  they can’t understand poetry

  but at least you poor creatures have an excuse.

  So I’m going to turn the page

  and not think about you and your impoverishment.

  Instead, I’m going to write a poem about red poppies

  waving by the side of the railroad tracks,

  and you people will never even know what you’re missing.

  What a Woman Said to Me After a Reading in the Napa Valley

  That many years ago she had a chance

  to hear Yehuda Amichai

  read his poems at a college in Santa Cruz,

  but a boy had invited her to go for a walk

  that would lead up a path into the nearby hills,

  so she decided to go for the walk with the boy instead.

  To have missed what turned out to be

  her only chance to hear the great Israeli poet

  filled her with regret to this day,

  but she clearly remembered the walk,

  especially the afternoon light on the green hills,

  though by now she had forgotten the name of the boy.

  I told her it sounded like she had the makings

  of a poem there, what with Amichai,

  the California light on the hills, and the forgotten boy.

  Then I drove off through the dormant vineyards

  wondering if the woman had ever written a poem herself

  and, if not, why in the world would she want to start now?

  Joy

  It’s not often that I see the sun rise

  and set on the same day as I did the other day.

  It’s easy to tell which is which

  even if you just emerged from a coma—

  the rising is a theatre of silvery air,

  and the setting done and imbued by gold.

  On the morning I’m thinking about

  it rose over a low cluster of clouds

  then burst forth and lit up the sunny side of everything.

  And when it went down, it went down

  in a cauldron of molten metal

  and seemed to shudder in a foundry of its own making.

  When I lay in the dark that night

  I imagined the sun shining down on Asia,

  always rising and setting somewhere

  waking some people, sending others to bed

  as it does in that love poem by John Donne.

  And I thought of the sun advancing

  in its own grander orbit, a father taking

  the family of planets for a ride through the Milky Way.

  What a brazen wonder to be alive on earth

  amid the clockwork of all this motion!

  This was in Key West. It was January

  when the early morning hours can be chilly.

  I remember putting on a sweater

  then stepping out onto the deck

  with the newspaper under my arm

  and checking out the water and the sky

  before lighting up a big El Stinko cigar.

  for Suzannah

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author gratefully acknowledges the editors of the following periodicals where some of these poems first appeared.

  American Poetry Review: “Hendrik Goltzius’s ‘Icarus’ (1588),” “One Leg of the Journey,” “Under the Stars,” “Santorini,” “Only Child,” “Lucky Cat”

  The Atlantic: “The Five Spot, 1964”

  Boulevard: “Poem to the First Generation of People to Exist After the Death of the English Language”

  Brilliant Corners: “1960”

  Five Points: “Bravura,” “Helium,” “Dream Life,” “Fire,” “The Night of the Fallen Limb,” “Species”

  Fulcrum: “Muybridge’s Lobsters”

  The Irish Times: “Bags of Time,” “Genuflection”

  The Kenyon Review: “Sixteen Years Old, I Help Bring in the Hay on My Uncle John’s Farm with Two French-Canadian Workers”

  The New Yorker: “Tanager,” “Cosmology”

  New Ohio Review: “The Lake,” “The Present”

  Plume: “In Praise of Ignorance,” “Many Moons,” “Note to J. Alfred Prufrock”

  Rhapsody: “The Bard in Flight”

  Shenandoah: “Child Lost at the Beach”

  The Southampton Review: “Early Morning,” “Oh, Lonesome Me,” “Traffic,” “Goats,” “Portrait,” “Predator”

  T Magazine (The New York Times): “Greece”

  “Speed Walking on August 31, 2013,” for Seamus Heaney, was printed in the program for his memorial service in Dublin.

  —

  I’m grateful to Bob and Laura Sillerman for their innumerable kindnesses and to Dana Prescott, my host at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, where some of these poems were written. Thanks also to the many helpful people at Random House, especially my new editor Andrea Walker.

  Great appreciation to Suzannah Gilman, whose pencil sharpened many of these poems, and to George Green, who graded them with his usual empathetic severity.

  BY BILLY COLLINS

  The Rain in Portugal

  Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems

  Horoscopes for the Dead

  Ballistics

  The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems

  Nine Horses

  Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

  Picnic, Lightningr />
  The Art of Drowning

  Questions About Angels

  The Apple That Astonished Paris

  EDITED BY BILLY COLLINS

  Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds (illustrations by David Allen Sibley)

  180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day

  Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BILLY COLLINS is the author of eleven collections of poetry and the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds. He was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006. A former Distinguished Professor at Lehman College (City University of New York), he is a Distinguished Fellow of the Rollins Winter Park Institute and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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