Weekly Reading

Eating Poetry

My poems resemble the bread of Egypt—one night
Passes over it, and you can't eat it any more.

So gobble them down now, while they're still fresh,
Before the dust of the world settles on them.

Where a poem belongs is here, in the warmth of the chest;
Out in the world it dies of cold.

You've seen a fish—put him on dry land,
He quivers for a few minutes, and then is still.

And even if you eat my poems while they're still fresh,
You still have to bring forward many images yourself.

Actually, friend, what you're eating is your own imagination.
These poems are not just some old proverbs.
~Rumi

Weekly Reading

The Student
My poetry instruction book,
which I bought at an outdoor stall along the river,

contains many rules
about what to avoid and what to follow.
More than two people in a poem
is a crowd, is one.

Mention what clothes you are wearing
as you compose, is another.
Avoid the word vortex,
the word velvety, and the word cicada.

When at a loss for an ending,
have some brown hens standing in the rain.

Never admit that you revise.
And--always keep your poem in one season.

I try to be mindful,
but in these last days of summer
whenever I look up from my page
and see a burn-mark of yellow leaves,

I think of the icy winds
that will soon be knifing through my jacket.
---Billy Collins

Weekly Reading

You, Reader
I wonder how you are going to feel
when you find out
that I wrote this instead of you.

that it was I who got up early
to sit in the kitchen
and mention with a pen

the rain-soaked windows,
the ivy wallpaper,
and the goldfish circling in its bowl

Go ahead and turn aside,
bite your lip and tear out the page,
but, listen -- it was just a matter of time

before one of us happened
to notice the unlit candles
and the clock humming on the wall.

Plus, nothing happened that morning--
a song on the radio,
a car whistling along the road outside--

and I was only thinking
about the shakers of salt and pepper
that were standing side by side on a place mat.

I wondered if they had become friends
after all these years
or if they were still strangers to one another

like you and I
who manage to be known and unknown
to each other at the same time --

me at this table with a bowl of pears,
you leaning in a doorway somewhere
near some blue hydrangeas, reading this.
~Billy Collins

Weekly Reading

Genius
was what they called you in high school
if you tripped on a shoelace in the hall
and all your books went flying.

Or if you walked into an open locker door
you would be known as Einstein,
who imagined riding a streetcar into infinity.

Later, genius became someone
who could take a sliver of chalk and squire pi
a hundred places out beyond the decimal point,

or someone painting on his back on a scaffold,
or a man drawing a waterwheel in a margin,
or spinning out a little night music.

But earlier this week on a wooded path,
I thought the swans afloat on the reservoir
were the true geniuses,

the ones who had figured out how to fly,
how to be both beautiful and brutal,
and how to mate for life.

Twenty-four geniuses in all,
for I numbered them as Yeats had done,
deployed upon the calm, crystalline surface--

forty-eight if we count their reflections,
or an even fifty if you want to toss in me
and the dog running up ahead,

who were smart enough to be out
that morning--she sniffing the ground,
me with my head up in the bight morning air.

~Billy Collins