Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

Book by Collins Billy

from

The Apple That Astonished Paris

(1988)

Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House

The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.

He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark

that he barks every time they leave the house.

They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.

I close all the windows in the house

and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast

but I can still hear him muffled under the music,

barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,

his head raised confidently as if Beethoven

had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,

sitting there in the oboe section barking,

his eyes fixed on the conductor who is

entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful

silence to the famous barking dog solo,

that endless coda that first established

Beethoven as an innovative genius. Walking Across the Atlantic

I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach

before stepping onto the first wave.

Soon I am walking across the Atlantic

thinking about Spain,

checking for whales, waterspouts.

I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.

Tonight I will sleep on its rocking surface.

But for now I try to imagine what

this must look like to the fish below,

the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing. Plight of the Troubadour

For a good hour I have been singing lays

in langue d’oc to a woman who knows

only langue d’oïl, an odd Picard dialect

at that.

The European love lyric is flourishing

with every tremor of my voice,

yet a friend has had to tap my shoulder

to tell me she has not caught a word.

My sentiments are tangled like kites

in the branches of her incomprehension,

and soon I will be lost in an anthology

and poets will no longer wear hats like mine.

Provence will be nothing more

than a pink hue on a map or an answer on a test.

And still the woman smiles over at me

feigning this look of sisterly understanding. The Lesson

In the morning when I found History

snoring heavily on the couch,

I took down his overcoat from the rack

and placed its weight over my shoulder blades.

It would protect me on the cold walk

into the village for milk and the paper

and I figured he would not mind,

not after our long conversation the night before.

How unexpected his blustering anger

when I returned covered with icicles,

the way he rummaged through the huge pockets

making sure no major battle or English queen

had fallen out and become lost in the deep snow. Winter Syntax

A sentence starts out like a lone traveler

heading into a blizzard at midnight,

tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face,

the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.

There are easier ways of making sense,

the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.

You hold a girl’s face in your hands like a vase.

You lift a gun from the glove compartment

and toss it out the window into the desert heat.

These cool moments are blazing with silence.

The full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses it

it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning

outside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afternoon

in a corner of the couch.

Bare branches in winter are a form of writing.

The unclothed body is autobiography.

Every lake is a vowel, every island a noun.

But the traveler persists in his misery,

struggling all night through the deepening snow,

leaving a faint alphabet of bootprints

on the white hills and the white floors of valleys,

a message for field mice and passing crows.

At dawn he will spot the vine of smoke

rising from your chimney, and when he stands

before you shivering, draped in sparkling frost,

a smile will appear in the beard of icicles,

and the man will express a complete thought. Advice to Writers

Even if it keeps you up all night,

wash down the walls and scrub the floor

of your study before composing a syllable.

Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.

Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.

The more you clean, the more brilliant

your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take

to the open fields to scour the undersides

of rocks or swab in the dark forest

upper branches, nests full of eggs.

When you find your way back home

and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink,

you will behold in the light of dawn

the immaculate altar of your desk,

a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.

From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift

a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet,

and cover pages with tiny sentences

like long rows of devoted ants

that followed you in from the woods. The Rival Poet

The column of your book titles,

always introducing your latest one,

looms over me like Roman architecture.

It is longer than the name

of an Italian countess, longer

than this poem will probably be.

Etched on the head of a pin,

my own production would leave room for

The Lord’s Prayer and many dancing angels.

No matter.

In my revenge daydream I am the one

poised on the marble staircase

high above the crowded ballroom.

A retainer in livery announces me

and the Contessa Maria Teresa Isabella

Veronica Multalire Eleganza de Bella Ferrari.

You are the one below

fidgeting in your rented tux

with some local Cindy hanging all over you. Insomnia

After counting all the sheep in the world

I enumerate the wildebeests, snails,

camels, skylarks, etc.,

then I add up all the zoos and aquariums,

country by country.

By early light I am asleep

in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood,

yelling across the rising water

at preoccupied Noah as his wondrous

ark sails by and begins to grow smaller.

Now a silhouette on the horizon,

the only boat on earth is disappearing.

As I rise and fall on the rocking waves,

I concentrate on the giraffe couple,

their necks craning over the roof,

to keep my life from flashing before me.

After all the animals wink out of sight

I float on my back, eyes closed.

I picture all the fish in creation

leaping a fence in a field of water,

one colorful species after another. Earthling

You have probably come across

those scales in planetariums

that tell you how much you

would weigh on other planets.

You have noticed the fat ones

lingering on the Mars scale

and the emaciated slowing up

the line for Neptune.

As a creature of average weight,

I fail to see the attraction.

Imagine squatting in the wasteland

of Pluto, all five tons of you,

or wandering around Mercury

wondering what to do next with your ounce.

How much better to step onto

the simple bathroom scale,

a happy earthling feeling

the familiar ropes of gravity,

157 pounds standing soaking wet

a respectful distance from the sun. Books

From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus

I can hear the library humming in the night,

a choir of authors murmuring inside their books

along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,

Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,

each one stitched into his own private coat,

together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

I picture a figure in the act of reading,

shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,

a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie

as the suicide of lovers saturates a page,

or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.

He moves from paragraph to paragraph

as if touring a house of endless, paneled rooms.

I hear the voice of my mother reading to me

from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,

and inside her voice lie other distant sounds,

the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,

a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.

I watch myself building bookshelves in college,

walls within walls, as rain soaks New England,

or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,

straining in circles of light to find more light

until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs

that we follow across a page of fresh snow; when evening is shadowing the forest

and small birds flutter down to consume the crumbs,

we have to listen hard to hear the voices

of the boy and his sister receding into the woods. Bar Time

In keeping with universal saloon practice,

the clock here is set fifteen minutes ahead

of all the clocks in the outside world.

This makes us a rather advanced group,

doing our drinking in the unknown future,

immune from the cares of the present,

safely harbored a quarter of an hour

beyond the woes of the contemporary scene.

No wonder such thoughtless pleasure derives

from tending the small fire of a cigarette,

from observing this glass of whiskey and ice,

the cold rust I am sipping,

or from having an eye on the street outside

when Ordinary Time slouches past in a topcoat,

rain running off the brim of his hat,

the late edition like a flag in his pocket. My Number

Is Death miles ...