Billy Collins Night

7/28/2019 Billy Collins Night

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THE NAMES

by Billy Collins

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.

A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze, And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,Then Baxter and Calabro,Davis and Eberling, names falling into place

As droplets fell through the dark.Names printed on the ceiling of the night.Names slipping around a watery bend.Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.In the morning, I walked out barefoot

Among thousands of flowers

Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears, And each had a name Fiori inscribed on a yellow petalThen Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.Names written in the air

And stitched into the cloth of the day. A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.Monogram on a torn shirt,I see you spelled out on storefront windows

And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.I say the syllables as I turn a corner

Kelly and Lee,Medina, Nardella, and OConnor. When I peer into the woods,I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden

As in a puzzle concocted for children.Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.Names written in the pale sky.Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.Names silent in stone

Or cried out behind a door.Names blown over the earth and out to sea.In the evening weakening light, the last swallows.

A boy on a lake lifts his oars. A woman by a window puts a match to a candle, And the names are outlined on the rose clouds Vanacore and Wallace,(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.Names etched on the head of a pin.One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.

A blue name needled into the skin.Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,


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The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son. Alphabet of names in a green field.Names in the small tracks of birds.Names lifted from a hatOr balanced on the tip of the tongue.

Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

Consolation

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.

How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboardand all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famousdomes and there is no need to memorize a successionof kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon'slittle bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.

How much better to command the simple precinct of home

than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyes cameraeager to eat the world one monument at a time?

Instead of slouching in a caf ignorant of the word for ice,I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitressknown as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morningpaper, all language barriers down,rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.

And after breakfast, I will not have to find someonewilling to photograph me with my arm around the owner.I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journalwhat I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.It is enough to climb back into the car

as if it were the great car of English itself and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.

Billy Collins


3/31

Child Development As sure as prehistoric fish grew legsand sauntered off the beaches into forestsworking up some irregular verbs for their first conversation, so three-year-old childrenenter the phase of name-calling.

Every day a new one arrives and is addedto the repertoire. You Dumb Goopyhead,

You Big Sewerface, You Poop-on-the-Floor (a kind of Navaho ring to that one)they yell from knee level, their little mugsflushed with challenge.Nothing Samuel Johnson would bother tossing outin a pub, but then the toddlers are not tryingto devastate some fatuous Enlightenment hack.

They are just tormenting their fellow squirtsor going after the attention of the giantsway up there with their cocktails and bad breathtalking baritone nonsense to other giants,waiting to call them names after thankingthem for the lovely party and hearing the door close.

The mature save their hothead invectivefor things: an errant hammer, tire chains,or receding trains missed by seconds,though they know in their adult hearts,

even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bedfor his appalling behavior,that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,their wives are Dopey Dopeheadsand that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants.

Billy Collins


4/31

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 studioaddressing a canvas tilted back on a tall easel.

He appears to be smiling out at us as if he knewwe would be amused by the extraordinary hat on his headwhich 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 liketo be wearing such a chandelier on your headas if you were a walking dining room or concert hall.

But once you see this hat there is no need to readany biography of Goya or to memorize his dates.

To understand Goya you only have to imagine himlighting the candles one by one, then placingthe 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 housewith 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


5/31

Dharma by Billy Collins The way the dog trots out the front door every morningwithout a hat or an umbrella,without any moneyor the keys to her doghousenever fails to fill the saucer of my heartwith milky admiration.

Who provides a finer exampleof a life without encumbrance Thoreau in his curtainless hutwith a single plate, a single spoon?Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material worldwith nothing but her brown coatand her modest blue collar,following only her wet nose,the twin portals of her steady breathing,followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she did not shove the cat asideevery morning

and eat all his foodwhat a model of self-containment shewould be,what a paragon of earthly detachment.If only she were not so eager for a rub behind the ears,so acrobatic in her welcomes,if only I were not her god.


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The Country Jan 05 2007

Billy Collins I wondered about you when you told me never to leavea box of wooden, strike-anywhere matcheslying around the house because the micemight get into them and start a fire.But your face was absolutely straight

when you twisted the lid down on the round tin where the matches, you said, are always stowed. Who could sleep that night? Who could whisk away the thoughtof one unlikely mousepadding along a cold water pipe behind the floral wallpaper

gripping a single wooden match between the needles of his teeth? Who could not see him rounding a corner,the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,the sudden flare, and the creaturefor one bright, shining momentsuddenly thrust ahead of his time-

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearerin a forgotten ritual, little brown druidilluminating some ancient night. Who could fail to notice,lit up in the blazing insulationthe tiny looks of wonderment on the facesof his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants

of what once was your house in the country?
http://borderland.northernattitude.org/2007/01/05/the-country/http://borderland.northernattitude.org/2007/01/05/the-country/http://borderland.northernattitude.org/2007/01/05/the-country/


7/31

Marginalia

Billy Collins

Listen (to Hatshepsut read)

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,skirmishes against the author

raging along the borders of every page

in tiny black script.

If I could just get my hands on you,

Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise OBrien,

they seem to say,

I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -Nonsense. Please! HA!! -

that kind of thing.

I remember once looking up from my reading,

my thumb as a bookmark,

trying to imagine what the person must look like

who wrote Dont be a ninny

alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest

needing to leave only their splayed footprints

along the shore of the page.

One scrawls Metaphor next to a stanza of Eliots.

Another notes the presence of Irony

fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,

Hands cupped around their mouths.

Absolutely, they shout

to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.

Yes. Bulls -eye. My man!

Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points

rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college

without ever having written Man vs. Nature

in a margin, perhaps now

is the time to take one step forward.
http://audiopoetry.wordpress.com/2006/10/01/marginalia/http://audiopoetry.wordpress.com/2006/10/01/marginalia/http://www.archive.org/download/audio_poetry_163_2006/CollinsMarginalia_64kb.mp3http://www.archive.org/download/audio_poetry_163_2006/CollinsMarginalia_64kb.mp3http://www.archive.org/download/audio_poetry_163_2006/CollinsMarginalia_64kb.mp3http://audiopoetry.wordpress.com/2006/10/01/marginalia/


8/31

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own

and reached for a pen if only to show

we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;

we pressed a thought into the wayside,

planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria

jotted along the borders of the Gospels

brief asides about the pains of copying,

a bird singing near their window,

or the sunlight that illuminated their page-

anonymous men catching a ride into the future

on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,

they say, until you have read him

enwreathed with Blakes furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,

the one that dangles from me like a locket,

was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye

I borrowed from the local library

one slow, hot summer.

I was just beginning high school then,

reading books on a davenport in my parents living room,

and I cannot tell you

how vastly my loneliness was deepened,

how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,

when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears

and next to them, written in soft pencil-by a beautiful girl, I could tell,

whom I would never meet-

Pardon the egg salad stains, but Im in love.


9/31

NIGHTCLUB

by Billy Collins

You are so beautiful and I am a foolto be in love with youis a theme that keeps coming upin songs and poems.There seems to be no room for variation.I have never heard anyone sing

I am so beautifuland you are a fool to be in love with me,even though this notion has surelycrossed the minds of women and men alike.

You are so beautiful, too bad you are a foolis another one you don't hear.Or, you are a fool to consider me beautiful.That one you will never hear, guaranteed.

For no particular reason this afternoonI am listening to Johnny Hartmanwhose dark voice can curl around

the concepts on love, beauty, and foolishnesslike no one else's can.It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarettesomeone left burning on a baby grand pianoaround three o'clock in the morning;smoke that billows up into the bright lightswhile out there in the darknesssome of the beautiful fools have gatheredaround little tables to listen,some with their eyes closed,others leaning forward into the musicas if it were holding them up,or twirling the loose ice in a glass,slipping by degrees into a rhythmic dream.

Yes, there is all this foolish beauty,borne beyond midnight,

that has no desire to go home,especially now when everyone in the room


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is watching the large man with the tenor saxthat hangs from his neck like a golden fish.He moves forward to the edge of the stageand hands the instrument down to meand nods that I should play.So I put the mouthpiece to my lipsand blow into it with all my living breath.We are all so foolish,my long bebop solo begins by saying,so damn foolishwe have become beautiful without even knowing it

THE HISTORY TEACHER

by Billy Collins

Trying to protect his students' innocence


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he told them the Ice Age was really justthe Chilly Age, a period of a million yearswhen everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,

named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing morethan an outbreak of questions such as"How far is it from here to Madrid?""What do you call the matador's hat?"

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,

and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan.

The children would leave his classroomfor the playground to torment the weak and the smart,mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered up his notes and walked homepast flower beds and white picket fences,wondering if they would believe that soldiersin the Boer War told long, rambling storiesdesigned to make the enemy nod off.

THESAURUS

by Billy Collins

It could be the name of a prehistoric beastthat roamed the Paleozoic earth, rising up

on its hind legs to show off its large vocabulary,or some lover in a myth who is metamorphosed into a book.


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It means treasury, but it is just a place

where words congregate with their relatives,

a big park where hundreds of family reunions

are always being held,

house, home, abode, dwelling, lodgings, and digs,

all sharing the same picnic basket and thermos;

hairy, hirsute, woolly, furry, fleecy, and shaggy

all running a sack race or throwing horseshoes,

inert, static, motionless, fixed and immobile

standing and kneeling in rows for a group photograph.

Here father is next to sire and brother close

to sibling, separated only by fine shades of meaning.

And every group has its odd cousin, the one

who traveled the farthest to be here:

astereognosis, polydipsia, or some eleven

syllable, unpronounceable substitute for the word tool.

Even their own relatives have to squint at their name tags.

I can see my own copy up on a high shelf.

I rarely open it, because I know there is no

such thing as a synonym and because I get nervous

around people who always assemble with their own kind,

forming clubs and nailing signs to closed front doors

while others huddle alone in the dark streets.

I would rather see words out on their own, away

from their families and the warehouse of Roget,

wandering the world where they sometimes fall

in love with a completely different word.

Surely, you have seen pairs of them standing forever

next to each other on the same line inside a poem,

a small chapel where weddings like these,

between perfect strangers, can take place.

THE REVENANT

by Billy Collins


13/31

I am the dog you put to sleep,as you like to call the needle of oblivion,come back to tell you this simple thing:I never liked you.

When I licked your face,I thought of biting off your nose.When I watched you toweling yourself dry,I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap.

I resented the way you moved,your lack of animal grace,

the way you would sit in a chair to eat,a napkin on your lap, knife in your hand.

I would have run away,but I was too weak, a trick you taught mewhile I was learning to sit and heel,and--greatest of insults--shake hands without a hand.

I admit the sight of the leashwould excite mebut only because it meant I was aboutto smell things you had never touched.

You do not want to believe this,but I have no reason to lie.I hated the car, the rubber toys,disliked your friends and, worse, your relatives.

The jingling of my tags drove me mad. You always scratched me in the wrong place. All I ever wanted from youwas food and fresh water in my metal bowls.

While you slept, I watched you breatheas the moon rose in the sky.It took all of my strengthnot to raise my head and howl.


14/31

Now I am free of the collar,the yellow raincoat, monogrammed sweater,the absurdity of your lawn,and that is all you need to know about this place

except what you already supposedand are glad it did not happen sooner--that everyone here can read and write,the dogs in poetry, the cats and all the others in prose.

THE TROUBLE WITH POETRY

by Billy Collins

The trouble with poetry, I realized


15/31

as I walked along a beach one night --cold Florida sand under my bare feet,a show of stars in the sky --

the trouble with poetry isthat it encourages the writing of more poetry,more guppies crowding the fish tank,more baby rabbitshopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

And how will it ever end?unless the day finally arriveswhen we have compared everything in the worldto everything else in the world,

and there is nothing left to dobut quietly close our notebooksand sit with our hands folded on our desks.

Poetry fills me with joyand I rise like a feather in the wind.Poetry fills me with sorrowand I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.

But mostly poetry fills mewith the urge to write poetry,to sit in the dark and wait for a little flameto appear at the tip of my pencil.

And along with that, the longing to steal,to break into the poems of otherswith a flashlight and a ski mask.

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,cut-purses, common shoplifters,I thought to myself as a cold wave swirled around my feetand the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,which is an image I stole directlyfrom Lawrence Ferlinghetti --to be perfectly honest for a moment --


16/31

the bicycling poet of San Franciscowhose little amusement park of a book I carried in a side pocket of my uniformup and down the treacherous halls of high school.

THE ART OF DROWNING

by Billy Collins

I wonder how it all got started, this business


17/31

about seeing your life flash before your eyeswhile you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,could startle time into such compression, crushingdecades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept awayin a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hopefor a more leisurely review, an invisible handturning 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 facein an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliancehere, 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 eyesas 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 allas 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.

QUESTIONS ABOUT ANGELS

by Billy Collins

Of all the questions you might want to ask about angels, the only one you ever hear


18/31

is how many can dance on the head of a pin.

No curiosity about how they pass the eternal timebesides circling the Throne chanting in Latin

or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earthor guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?Do they swing like children from the hingesof the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?

What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,

their diet of unfiltered divine light?What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wallthese tall presences can look over and see hell?

If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a holein a river and would the hole float along endlesslyfilled with the silent letters of every angelic word?

If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrivein a blinding rush of wings or would he just assumethe appearance of the regular mailman andwhistle up the driveway reading the postcards?

No, the medieval theologians control the court.The only question you ever hear is aboutthe little dance floor on the head of a pinwhere halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.

It is designed to make us think in millions,billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapseinto infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,a small jazz combo working in the background.

She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful

eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over


19/31

to glance at his watch because she has been dancingforever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

HOROSCOPES FOR THE DEAD

by Billy Collins

Every morning since you fell down on the face of the earth,


20/31

I read about you in the newspaperalong with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news.

Sometimes I am reminded that todaywill not be a wildly romantic time for you,

nor will you be challenged by educational goalsnor will you need to be circumspect at the workplace.

Another day, I learn that you will missan opportunity to travel and make new friendsthough you never cared much about either.

I cant imagine you ever facing a new problem

with a positive attitude, but you will definitely notbe doing that or anything like that on this weekday in March.

And the same goes for the funyou might have gotten from group activities,a likelihood attributed to everyone under your sign.

A dramatic rise in income may be a reasonto treat yourself, but that would applymore to all the Pisces who are still alive today,still swimming up and down the stream of lifeor suspended in a pool in the shade of an overhanging tree.

But it will come as a relief to learnthat you dont need to reflect carefully before acting nor do you have to think more of others,and never again will creative work take a back seatto the business responsibilities that you never really had.

And dont worry today or any other day about unwanted problems caused by your failureto interact rationally with your many associates.No more goals for you, no more pressing matters,no more money or children, jobs or important tasks,but then again, you were never thus encumbered.

So leave it to me nowto plan carefully for success and the wealth it brings,


21/31


22/31

with the possible company of my death,this sprawling miscellany of people carry-on bags and paperbacks that could be gathered in a flashinto a band of pilgrims on the last open road.

Not that I think if our plane crumpled into a mountainwe would all ascend together,holding hands like a ring of skydivers,into a sudden gasp of brightness,or that there would be some common placefor us to reunite to jubilize the moment,some spaceless, pillarless Greece

where we could, at the count of three,toss our ashes into the sunny air.It's just that the way that man has his briefcaseso carefully arranged,the way that girl is cooling her tea,and the flow of the comb that womanpasses through her daughter's hair ...and when you consider the altitude,the secret parts of the engines,and all the hard water and the deep canyons below ...well, I just think it would be good if one of usmaybe stood up and said a few words,or, so as not to involve the police,at least quietly wrote something down.

MONDAY

The birds are in their trees,

the toast is in the toaster,and the poets are at their windows.


23/31

They are at their windowsin every section of the tangerine of earth-the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,the American poets gazing outat the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.

The clerks are at their desks,the miners are down in their mines,and the poets are looking out their windowsmaybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.

The proofreaders are playing the ping-ponggame of proofreading,glancing back and forth from page to page,the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,and the poets are at their windowsbecause it is their job for whichthey are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

Which window it hardly seems to matterthough many have a favorite,for there is always something to see-a bird grasping a thin branch,the headlights of a taxi rounding a corner,those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.

The fishermen bob in their boats,

the linemen climb their round poles,the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,and the poets continue to stareat the cracked birdbath or a limb knocked down by the wind.

By now, it should go without sayingthat what the oven is to the bakerand the berry-stained blouse to the dry cleaner,so the window is to the poet.


24/31

Just think-before the invention of the window,the poets would have had to put on a jacketand a winter hat to go outsideor remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.

And when I say a wall,I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaperand a sketch of a cow in a frame.

I mean a cold wall of fieldstones,the wall of the medieval sonnet,

the original woman's heart of stone,the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover. 71

The Lanyard - Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowlyoff the blue walls of this room,
https://www.facebook.com/BillyCollinsPoetryhttps://www.facebook.com/BillyCollinsPoetryhttps://www.facebook.com/BillyCollinsPoetryhttps://www.facebook.com/BillyCollinsPoetry


25/31

moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,

from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,

when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary

where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist

could send one into the past more suddenly

a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp

by a deep Adirondack lake

learning how to braid long thin plastic strips

into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard

or wear one, if thats what you did with them,

but that did not keep me from crossing

strand over strand again and again

until I had made a boxy

red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,

and I gave her a lanyard.

She nursed me in many a sick room,lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,

laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,

and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,

and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,

and here is clothing and a good education.

And here is your lanyard, I replied,

which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,

strong legs, bones and teeth,

and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,

and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now,

is a smaller gift not the worn truth


26/31

that you can never repay your mother,

but the rueful admission that when she took

the two-tone lanyard from my hand,

I was as sure as a boy could be

that this useless, worthless thing I wove

out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Litany - Billy Collins

You are the bread and the knife,

The crystal goblet and the wine...

- Jacques Crickillon


27/31

You are the bread and the knife,

the crystal goblet and the wine.

You are the dew on the morning grass

and the burning wheel of the sun.

You are the white apron of the baker,

and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,

the plums on the counter,

or the house of cards.

And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.

There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,

maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,

but you are not even close

to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show

that you are neither the boots in the corner

nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,

speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,

that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,

the evening paper blowing down an alley

and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees

and the blind woman's tea cup.

But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.

You are still the bread and the knife.

You will always be the bread and the knife,

not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.


28/31

Forgetfulness - Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go

followed obediently by the title, the plot,

the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel


29/31

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.

The the Impotence of Proofreading by Taylor Mali

Has this ever happened to you?

You work very horde on a paper for English clash

And then get a very glow raid (like a D or even a D=)


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31/31

Which reminds me of this one time during my Junior Mint.

The teacher read my entire paper on A Sale of Two Titties

out loud to all of my assmates.

I1m not joking, I1m totally cereal.It was the most humidifying experience of my life,

being laughed at pubically.

So do yourself a flavor and follow these two Pisces of advice:

One: There is no prostitute for careful editing.

And three: When it comes to proofreading,

the red penis your friend.

Billy Collins Night

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Transcript of Billy Collins Night