“…perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.
Poet Billy Collins‘ answer to the philosopher’s question (from Questions About Angles)
Tag Archives: Poetry
A single chair in a room full of corrugated memories
I’ve always believed poetry is where you find it. On a billboard. A T-shirt. Or a blog. And the best blogs are personal and honest. From Dave’s Window:
“Everything is packed, the house is quiet. Stacks of boxes clutter the once-beautiful Morris manse, and the only thing connected to the outside world is my trusty laptop. The dog’s at my feet and I’m having coffee. It’s a sad day, the ‘last stand’ at the house my wife and I shared.”
Nostalgia by Billy Collins
Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.
Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.
The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.
Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.
As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.
More Billy Collins poetry
The poem I couldn’t remember was by Billy Collins. Here’s another:
Flames
Smokey the Bear heads
into the autumn woods
with a red can of gasoline
and a box of wooden matches.
His ranger’s hat is cocked
at a disturbing angle.
His brown fur gleams
under the high sun
as his paws, the size
of catcher’s mitts,
crackle into the distance.
He is sick of dispensing
warnings to the careless,
the half-wit camper,
the dumbbell hiker.
He is going to show them
how a professional does it.
Table Watching.
“Crash, heartache heading your way boy, when I look into her icy porcelain face. Pretty english girl looks — china shop white skin and black straight hair, but more than English, something mixed in there to make her more exotic, maybe half Japanese, and very beautiful. But may I tell you, kind eager guy, run for your life. She’s fine and special and complicated in ways you will be so sorry to learn about and she’ll do you serious damage dear. She leans back in her seat, stretched as far away from him as she can. Nothing on the menu is right. Something he did last night, brings a slightly sour expression to her face. Run now.”