The Hunt by Billy Collins

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.
Billy Collins
Questions About Angels ISBN: 0-8229-5698-5

Skomer Island isthmus

Endangered by Billy Collins

Endangered


It is so quiet on the shore of this motionless lake
you can hear the slow recessional of extinct animals
as they leave through a door at the back of the world,
disappearing like the verbs of a dead language:


the last troop of kangaroos hopping out of the picture,
the ultimate paddling of ducks and pitying of turtledoves
and, his bell tolling in the distance, the final goat.

Billy Collins

  Snow-Leopard

Weighing the Dog by Billy Collins

Weighing the Dog

It is awkward for me and bewildering for him
as I hold him in my arms in the small bathroom,
balancing our weight on the shaky blue scale,

but this is the way to weigh a dog and easier
than training him to sit obediently on one spot
with his tongue out, waiting for the cookie.

With pencil and paper I subtract my weight
from our total to find out the remainder that is his,
and I start to wonder if there is an analogy here.

It could not have to do with my leaving you
though I never figured out what you amounted to
until I subtracted myself from our combination.

You held me in your arms more than I held you
through all those awkward and bewildering months
and now we are both lost in strange and distant neighborhoods.

Billy Collins

Questions About Angels ISBN: 0-8229-5698-5

 all dogs refused to have picture taken while being held and weighed

Candle Hat by Billy Collins

Candle Hat In most self-portraits it is the face that dominates: Cezanne is a pair of eyes swimming in brushstrokes, Van Gogh stares out of a halo of swirling darkness, Rembrant looks relieved as if he were taking a breather from painting The Blinding of Sampson. 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, the 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. Billy Collins Questions About Angels ISBN 0-8229-5698-5  Wikimedia - Goya's self-portrait

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

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 illustrations 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.
Billy Collins
Questions About Angels ISBN 0-8229-5698-5 

Fun with Dick and Jane

inside his generous pocket of silence

Shoveling Snow With Buddha

In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.

Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not do.

Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression,
that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?

But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.

This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.

He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.

All morning long we work side by side,
me with my commentary
and he inside his generous pocket of silence,
until the hour is nearly noon
and the snow is piled high all around us;
then, I hear him speak.

After this, he asks,
can we go inside and play cards?

Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk
and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table
while you shuffle the deck.
and our boots stand dripping by the door.

Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
and leaning for a moment on his shovel
before he drives the thin blade again
deep into the glittering white snow.
Billy Collins

Warm Nature by Jordy Roelofs

For the Children by Gary Snyder

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

Gary Snyder

photo, of Sarah and her sisters, provided by me.

poem by John Lavan

 

Slowly

I decided to tell you

slowly

when my Dad

walked up the beach

in baggy shorts and sandals

on his last ever holiday

he was fascinated by pebbles, shells,

people passing in bright shirts

and he smiled in the sun

taking all the time

in the world to

walk and look:

slowly

I decided to tell you.

 photo by Urban Expressions http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=5172466&id=213577705557

it will probably be a fish,

The Art Of Drowning

I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.
Billy Collins

 

http://alicedraws.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2009-12-07T12%3A46%3A00Z&max-results=10

time will drop its sail like a clipper in a lagoon

Song of the Current at Cape Horn

Come ride the fish-bright
   swells of my flesh
and lay-by in my limbs,
   greener than a glade.
Run aground, sailor,
   in my dark, tussocked eyes
swing round your mizzen,
   shipwreck in my thighs.

Only, come to my harbor.
   Sweet is the port air.
Time will drop its sail
   like a clipper in a lagoon.

There's a berth in my hips
   as wide as the moon,
a ribcage roomier than the sea,
   and here, awash
between outcry and the deep blue,
   my plunging heart
will fathom life from you.

   Diane Ackerman

http://www.wainscoat.com/south-america/cape-horn5.jpg

"Nature loves our vacuum, blesses us with a bounty..."

Not of This World by Sheri Hostetler

I am like none of you. You must recognize
deep in me how different I am. you're all
Wonder Bread and drive-ins. I am fertile
fields, head coverings, memories of martyrdom
like yesterday, hymns without organ. The
Bible whispers in my ear at night, it will
not keep still.

But my people do. Die Stille em Lande. We
never talk. Quietly we move, quietly the
fields are plowed, in quiet are the dishes
washed, the sheets pulled taut, silently the
hay flung high atop the wagons. Our horses
clip clop in a virtual vacuum. All around
us pins drop, and, still, we are still.

Nature loves our vacuum, blesses us with a
bounty you cannot imagine. Look at our barns,
they are filled with sweet hay, hay without
end, stacked fragrant, stacked sweet. We
do not talk but we smell the sweetness of
hay everyday, oh stranger, you know not what
you are not.

I am not like you. I talk with you, laugh
with you, make love with you, break bread
with you, I will even die with you. And my soul
will rest atop a haymow on Weaver Ridge while yours
goes to heaven.

more Billy Collins

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
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Billy Collins

Stopping by Fields on a Snowy Afternoon by Jane Rohrer

Stopping by Fields on a Snowy Afternoon

You've obviously been here
   since my last visit.
    and I like what you've done
But is it landscape
   or is it art?
It's all so confusing
   with you coming from the other side.

Calligraphy, there on the contours of the field,
   scribbling in stalks and stacks
   left from the fall,
   are visible in the distant upper levels
   of the canvas,
If it is a canvas.
But, it's the wash of thin white,
   just a sift of snow,
   (or is it white,)
   that erases the visual samsara
   and beckons to me from beyond the pale.
But I can't.
I am per pale.

We've been split like a schist.
Here I am and there you are,
   parallel.

http://tinyfarmblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/win07_snowy_field_january1.jpg

http://www.ntoddblog.org/photos/winter/shadowsonthehille.html

While Eating a Pear, by Billy Collins

After we have finished here,
the world will continue its quiet turning,

and the days and months will pass
without the names of Norse and Roman gods.
*
Time will go by the way it did
before history, pure and unnoticed,
a mystery that arose between the sun and moon
before there was a word
for dawn or noon or midnight,
*
before there were names for the earth's
uncountable things,
when fruit hung anonymously
from scattered groves of trees,
light on the smooth green side,
shadow on the other.

Featured Poet:: Anyone you Want!

Any poet you want to post a poem, or information about, please do.

Why Can't I Leave You by Ai

Why Can't I Leave You?, Ai

You stand behind the old black mare,
dressed as always in that red shirt,
stained from sweat, the crying of the armpits,
that will not stop for anything,
stroking her rump, while the barley goes unplanted.
I pick up my suitcase and set it down,
as I try to leave you again.
I smooth the hair back from your forehead.
I think with your laziness and the drought too,
you’ll be needing my help more than ever.
You take my hands, I nod
and go to the house to unpack,
having found another reason to stay.

I undress, then put on my white lace slip
for you to take off, because you like that
and when you come in, you pull down the straps
and I unbutton your shirt.
I know we can’t give each other any more
or any less than what we have.
There is a safety in that, so much
that I can never get past the packing,
the begging you to please, if I can’t make you happy,
come close between my thighs
and let me laugh for you from my second mouth.

Twenty-year Marriage by Ai

Twenty-year Marriage

by Ai

You keep me waiting in a truck

with its one good wheel stuck in the ditch,

while you piss against the south side of a tree.

Hurry. I’ve got nothing on under my skirt tonight.

That still excites you, but this pickup has no windows

and the seat, one fake leather thigh,

pressed close to mine is cold.

I’m the same size, shape, make as twenty years ago,

but get inside me, start the engine;

you’ll have the strength, the will to move.

I’ll pull, you push, we’ll tear each other in half.

Come on, baby, lay me down on my back.

Pretend you don’t owe me a thing

and maybe we’ll roll out of here,

leaving the past stacked up behind us;

old newspapers nobody’s ever got to read again.

Conversation by Ai

Conversation

We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don't tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that's where I'm floating,
and that's what it's like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?




Ai

Shoveling Snow With Buddha by Billy Collins

In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.

Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not do.

Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression,
that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?

But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.

This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.

He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.


All morning long we work side by side,
me with my commentary
and he inside his generous pocket of silence,
until the hour is nearly noon
and the snow is piled high all around us;
then, I hear him speak.

After this, he asks,
can we go inside and play cards?

Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk
and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table
while you shuffle the deck.
and our boots stand dripping by the door.

Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
and leaning for a moment on his shovel
before he drives the thin blade again
deep into the glittering white snow.

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver is the featured poet for Sunday, October 4th, through Saturday, October 10th.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_oliver

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/mary_oliver