Walking across the Atlantic

Walking across the Atlantic
by Billy Collins

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.

Permission Granted

Permission Granted
by David Allen Sullivan

You do not have to choose the bruised peach
or misshapen pepper others pass over.
You don't have to bury
your grandmother's keys underneath
her camellia bush as the will states.

You don't need to write a poem about
your grandfather coughing up his lung
into that plastic tube—the machine's wheezing
almost masking the kvetching sisters
in their Brooklyn kitchen.

You can let the crows amaze your son
without your translation of their cries.

You can lie so long under this
summer shower your imprint
will be left when you rise.

You can be stupid and simple as a heifer.
Cook plum and apple turnovers in the nude.
Revel in the flight of birds without
dreaming of flight. Remember the taste of
raw dough in your mouth as you edged a pie.

Feel the skin on things vibrate. Attune
yourself. Close your eyes. Hum.
Each beat of the world's pulse demands
only that you feel it. No thoughts.
Just the single syllable: Yes ...

See the homeless woman following
the tunings of a dead composer?
She closes her eyes and sways
with the subways. Follow her down,
inside, where the singing resides. 

"Permission Granted" by David Allen Sullivan, from Strong-Armed Angels. © Hummingbird Press, 2008.

A Dirge

A Dirge
By Christina Rossetti

Why were you born when the snow was falling?
You should have come to the cuckoo’s calling,
Or when grapes are green in the cluster,
Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster
   For their far off flying
   From summer dying.

Why did you die when the lambs were cropping?
You should have died at the apples’ dropping,
When the grasshopper comes to trouble,
And the wheat-fields are sodden stubble,
   And all winds go sighing
   For sweet things dying.

Baloney

Baloney
by Louis Jenkins

There's a young couple in the parking lot, kissing.
Not just kissing, they look as though they might eat
each other up, kissing, nibbling, biting, mouths wide
open, play fighting like young dogs, wrapped around
each other like snakes. I remember that, sort of, that
hunger, that passionate intensity. And I get a kind of
nostalgic craving for it, in the way that I get a craving,
occasionally, for the food of my childhood. Baloney
on white bread, for instance: one slice of white bread
with mustard or Miracle Whip or ketchup-not
ketchup, one has to draw the line somewhere-and
one slice of baloney. It had a nice symmetry to it, the
circle of baloney on the rectangle of bread. Then you
folded the bread and baloney in the middle and took
a bite out of the very center of the folded side. When
you unfolded the sandwich you had a hole, a circle in
the center of the bread and baloney frame, a window,
a porthole from which you could get a new view of
the world. 

"Baloney" by Louis Jenkins, from Tin Flag: New and Selected Prose Poems. © Will o' the Wisp books, 2013.

Droplets

Droplets
by C. K. Williams

Even when the rain falls relatively hard,
only one leaf at a time of the little tree
you planted on the balcony last year,
then another leaf at its time, and one more,
is set trembling by the constant droplets,

but the rain, the clouds flocked over the city,
you at the piano inside, your hesitant music
mingling with the din of the downpour,
the gush of rivulets loosed from the eaves,
the iron railings and flowing gutters,

all of it fuses in me with such intensity
that I can't help wondering why my longing
to live forever has so abated that it hardly
comes to me anymore, and never as it did,
as regret for what I might not live to live,

but rather as a layering of instants like this,
transient as the mist drawn from the rooftops,
yet emphatic as any note of the nocturne
you practice, and, the storm faltering, fading
into its own radiant passing, you practice again. 

"Droplets" by C.K. Williams, from Collected Poems. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

Things

Things
by Lisel Mueller

What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety. 

"Things" by Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together. © Louisiana State University Press, 1996

Progress

Progress
by Julie Cadwallader-Staub

I did not just drag and drop.
I did not just haul a burden so heavy
that my hands, arms, and shoulders
gave way
and I had to let it go.

Neither did I just browse.
I did not get on my hands and knees
and join the gentle cows
to slowly sample
whatever the open field had to offer.

Instead, I sat here at my desk
manipulating a mouse
which is not, in fact, a mouse
and I searched
for something on the web
that is not, in fact, a web.

And isn't this how we move forward:

with horsepower for jet engines
and candlepower for light bulbs
we take what we understand from one era
to describe
what we don't
in the next.

"Progress" by Julie Cadwallader-Staub.
© Julie Cadwallader-Staub

Pari Passu

 Word of the Day

pari passu \PAH-ree PAHS-soo; Eng. PAIR-ahy PAS-oo, PAIR-ee\, adverb:

1. with equal pace or progress; side by side.

2. without partiality; equably; fairly.

But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum—which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing—stood in the way of all that.

-- Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, 1886

Man who falls victim to transcendence as the spirit of abstraction, i.e., elevates self to posture over and against world which is pari passu demoted to immanence and seen as exemplar and specimen and coordinate, and who is not at same time compensated by beauty of motion of method of science, has no choice but to seek reentry into immanent world qua immanence.

-- Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman, 1966

Pari passu comes directly from the Latin phrase of the same spelling. It commonly meant "simultaneously" and literally meant "with equal step."

The Dark Room

A Metaphor For My Life
by Charles Deemer

Each morning before sunrise
I move through the dark house
in small, careful steps
trying not to bump into anything
trying not to knock over anything
and gaining no confidence whatever
from the hundreds and hundreds of times
I've done this before

Wanderer's Nightsong

For my friend Gretchen.

Über allen Gipfeln 
Ist Ruh, 
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du 
Kaum einen Hauch; 
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde 
Ruhest du auch.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Over all the hilltops
is calm.
In all the treetops
you feel
hardly a breath of air.
The little birds fall silent in the woods.
Just wait... soon
you'll also be at rest.

Self-Pity

Self-Pity
by D.H. Lawrence

I never saw a wild thing 
sorry for itself. 
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

TOWARDS FREEDOM

TOWARDS FREEDOM
by Mervyn Taylor

In the cell where Mandela languished for years,
President Obama stands, tall enough to see
from the window the rocks of Robben Island
where the gulls slip and stumble, like the
former prisoner’s lawyers, when their cases
grew weak and fell apart. Alone, the American
leans, in chinos, his forehead against the bars,
his wife and kids allowing him a moment to reflect
upon his hero, whose fancy shirt is now covered 
by the shadows of birds swooping low outside
his room, doctors in the hallway conferring.

The world awaits one leader’s passing, while
the other bends under the blades of the waiting
helicopter, unlike Madiba, whose wings will
have to lift, and carry him the rest of the way.

Mervyn Taylor is a Trinidad-born poet who divides his time between Brooklyn and his native island. He has taught at The New School and in the New York City public school system, and is the author of four books of poetry, namely, An Island of His Own (1992) , The Goat (1999), Gone Away (2006), and No Back Door (2010). He can be heard on an audio collection, Road Clear, accompanied by bassist David Williams.

Eden

Eden

No matter what the day brings
it begins here and now at 4 a.m.
in silence as comforting as breath
the mind without distraction
the streets empty, the dogs asleep
only thought alive in reflection
of good fortune, of past blessings
enjoyed before the engines start
the lights come on, the dogs bark
and day begins here where noise
and frantic action drive the hour
and no one knows how to be still.

Charles Deemer

Puzzle Dust

Puzzle Dust
by Dorianne Laux

When the final piece is lifted and set in place,
completing the field, filling the hole
in a grove of trees, a jagged gap
in the ocean or the flat, black sky.
When the scene is whole before me:
tiny men, arms thin as wicks, walking
briskly along a gray rain-riven street,
the woman bent to her dog under an awning,
his wet head held up with trust,
one white paw in her hand, tip
of his tail I kept trying all day
to press into the starry night, ruffled
hem of her blown-up skirt
that never fit into the distant waves
breaking along the shore,
and the bridge, its rickrack of steel girders
I thought were train tracks or a fallen fence,
when it all, at last, makes sense, a vast
satisfaction fills me: the mossy boulders,
pleasing in their eternal random piles,
the river eased around them, green
with its fever to reach the sea,
a ragged bunch of flowers gathered
from the hills I've locked together,
edge to edge, and placed in a glittering vase
behind a window streaked with rain
which the child in his woolen cap
looks into: boxes of candy wrapped
and displayed, desire burning
in his belly, precursor to the fire
that could have broken his small heart
open like a coal someday
in his future, which for him
is nothing but this empty box
layered with a fine dust, the stuff
from which he was born and will
die into, carried, weightless,
to summer's open door
where I bang my hand against
the cardboard, watch the particles,
like chaff or ashes, vanish in wind.

"Puzzle Dust" by Dorianne Laux, from Facts About the Moon. © Norton, 2006.

Request

Request
by Lawrence Raab

For a long time I was sure
it should be "Jumping Jack Flash," then
the adagio from Schubert's C major Quintet,
but right now I want Oscar Peterson's

"You Look Good to Me." That's my request.
Play it at the end of the service,
after my friends have spoken.
I don't believe I'll be listening in,

but sitting here I'm imagining
you could be feeling what I'd like to feel—
defiance from the Stones, grief
and resignation with Schubert, but now

Peterson and Ray Brown are making
the moment sound like some kind
of release. Sad enough
at first, but doesn't it slide into

tapping your feet, then clapping
your hands, maybe standing up
in that shadowy hall in Paris
in the late sixties when this was recorded,

getting up and dancing
as I would not have done,
and being dead, cannot, but might
wish for you, who would then

understand what a poem—or perhaps only
the making of a poem, just that moment
when it starts, when so much
is still possible—

has allowed me to feel.
Happy to be there. Carried away. 

"Request" by Lawrence Raab, from Visible Signs. © Penguin, 2003

Different Drummer

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? 

. . .Walden by Henry David Thoreau 1854

Six Word Memoirs III

ABCs MTV SATs THC IRA NPR.

--- Jancee Dunn

From Not Quite What I Was Planning,  Six-word memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.

Wounds and deficiencies

One should conceal one's wounds and hide the crippling deficiencies of life -- poverty, misfortune, sickness, ill-success.  People begin by being touched and moved to tenderness by their friends' distress; presently this changes to pity, which has something humiliating about it; then to a masterful giving of advice; and then to scorn. 

--Senac de Meilhan 

Quoted in "The Far Side of the World" by Patrick O'Brian

Distance and a Certain Light

Distance and a Certain Light
by May Swenson

Distance
and a certain light
makes anything artistic—
it doesn't matter what.

From an airplane, all
that rigid splatter of the Bronx
becomes organic, logical
as web or beehive. Chunks

of decayed cars in junkyards,
garbage scows (nimble roaches
on the Harlem), herds of stalled
manure-yellow boxes on twisting reaches

of rails, are punched clean and sharp
as ingots in the ignition of the sun.
Rubbish becomes engaging shape—
you only have to get a bead on it,

the right light filling the corridor
of your view—a gob of spit
under a microscope, fastidious
in structure as a crystal. No contortion

without intention, and nothing ugly.
In any random, sprawling, decomposing thing
is the charming string
of its history—and what it will be next. 

"Distance and a Certain Light" by May Swenson, from Collected Poems. © The Library of America, 2013.

Six-Word Memoirs II

Memory was my drug of choice.

--- Pea Hicks

From Not Quite What I Was Planning,  Six-word memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.

Six-Word Memoirs

Macular degeneration.  Didn't see that coming.

--Ian Gould
From Not Quite What I Was Planning,  Six-word memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.

Word for the day: hadal

hadal \HEYD-l\, adjective:

1. of or pertaining to the greatest ocean depths, below approximately 20,000 feet (6500 meters).

2. of or pertaining to the biogeographic region of the ocean bottom below the abyssal zone.

Here a once-living being found the hadal current which twists in the waters of all rivers.
-- Lawrence Norfolk, The Shape of a Boar, 2000

By which I mean, if the earth itself were shrunk to the size of a lemon, the black hadal depths of even the Marianas Trench would be shallower than that moist breath of yours gathered on the lemon's skin.
-- Brad Leithauser, The Friends of Freeland, 1997

Hadal entered English in the mid-1900s, and comes from the name Hades, the Greek god of the underworld.

Advice to Myself

Advice to Myself
Louise Erdrich

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator

and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

by Louise Erdrich, from Original Fire: Selected and New Poems. © Harper Collins Publishers, 2003.

Word for the Day: daedal

dae•dal (deed l)

adj.
1. skillful; ingenious
2. cleverly intricate
3. diversified
4. Finely or skillfully made or employed; artistic
5. A complex set of variations based on a simple folk melody

I was impressed by the computer's daedal circuitry.

[1580–90; < Latin daedalus skillful < Greek]

From Greek mythology: Daedalus, an Athenian inventor who built the labyrinth of Minos; to escape the labyrinth he fashioned wings for himself and his son Icarus

Amongst the French

Amongst the French
by Paul Zimmer

I do not have their words,
do not have their years or customs.
Passing them on the road,
shy as fog passing down
slopes into the valley,
I always give first utterance
or make an uncertain gesture.

My neighbors are kind,
knowing I am like rain,
that if they wait long enough,
in time I will go away.

It is the same for me in
all directions—under stars
swarming out of foothills,
on the gravel I churn
with my shoes—east, west, 
north, or south—the same.
If I remained in
this friendly place forever,
I would always be a stranger. 

"Amongst the French" by Paul Zimmer, from Crossing to Sunlight Revisited. © The University of Georgia Press, 2007

Smoke

Smoke
by Faith Shearin

It was everywhere in my childhood: in restaurants,
on buses or planes. The teacher's lounge looked like
London under fog. My grandmother never stopped

smoking, and walking in her house was like diving
in a dark pond. Adults were dimly lit: they carried
matches in their pockets as if they might need fire

to see. Cigarette machines inhaled quarters and
exhaled rectangles. Women had their own brands,
long and thin; one was named Eve and it was meant

to be smoked in a garden thick with summer flowers.
I'm speaking of moods: an old country store where
my grandfather met friends and everyone spoke

behind a veil of smoke. (My Uncle Bill preferred
fragrant cigars; I can still smell his postal jacket ...)
He had time to tell stories because he took breaks

and there was something to do with his hands.
My mother's bridge club gathered around tables
with ashtrays and secrets which are best revealed

beside fire. Even the fireplaces are gone: inefficient
and messy. We are healthier now and safer! We have
exercise and tests for breast or colon cancer. We have

helmets and car seats and smokeless coffee shops
where coffee has grown frothy and complex. The old
movies are so full of smoke that actors are hard to see

and they are often wrapped in smoking jackets, bent
over a piano or kiss. I miss the places smoke created.
I like the way people sat down for rest or pleasure

and spoke to other people, not phones, and the tiny fire
which is crimson and primitive and warm. How long
ago when humans found this spark of warmth and made

their first circle? What about smoke as words? Or the
pipes of peace? In grade school we learned how it rises
and how it can kill. We were taught to shove towels

under our closed doors: to stop, drop, and roll. We had
a plan to meet our family in the yard, the house behind
us alive with all we cannot put out...

"Smoke" by Faith Shearin, from The Empty House. © Word Press, 2008

Word for the Day: Litotes

Litotes

In rhetoric, litotes (pron.: \ˈlī-tə-ˌtēz, ˈli-, lī-ˈtō-ˌtēz\) is a figure of speech in which understatement is employed for rhetorical effect, principally via double negatives. For example, rather than saying that something is attractive (or even very attractive), one might merely say it is "not unattractive".

Litotes is a form of understatement, always deliberate and with the intention of emphasis. However, the interpretation of negation may depend on context, including cultural context. In speech, it may also depend on intonation and emphasis; for example, the phrase "not bad" can be said in such a way as to mean anything from "mediocre" to "excellent".

The use of litotes is common in English, Russian, German and French. They are features of Old English poetry and of the Icelandic sagas and are a means of much stoical restraint.

George Orwell complained about overuse of the 'not un...' construction in his essay "Politics and the English Language".

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The vast potentiality for happiness

From “PostCaptain” by Patrick O’Brian.

“When I let my mind dwell on the vast potentiality for happiness, and our present state? Such potentiality, and so much misery? Hatred the only moving force, a petulant unhappy striving – childhood the only happiness, and that unknowing; then the continual battle that cannot ever possibly be won; a losing fight against ill health – poverty for nearly all.  Life is a long disease with only one termination and its last years are appalling: weak, racked by the stone, rheumatismal pains, senses going, friends, family, occupation gone, a man must pray for imbecility or a heart of stone.  All under sentence of death, often ignominious frequently agonizing: and then the unspeakable levity with which the faint chance of happiness is thrown away for some jealousy, tiff, sullenness, private vanity, mistaken sense of honor, that deadly, weak and silly notion.”

Guatemala

Guatemala

Ruth Yarrow, Seattle, Washington

waking to soft light
on our interior wall—
sun gilds the courtyard

motorbike
over sun-warmed cobblestones 
her bosoms jiggle

she slaps rhythm
into her tortillas— 
hoofs on cobblestones

monastery:
cascading toward the fountain bouganvillea

poor end of town—
between rusted roof ridges 
streams of silver rain

tour guide’s violent tale—
through the shutters, faintly marimbas

Antigua at dusk—
among the cobblestones 
glass shards glitter

barefoot in velvet dark
only a whiff of woodsmoke . . . 
and smooth cool tiles

Spring

Spring
by Jim Harrison

Something new in the air today, perhaps the struggle of the bud
to become a leaf. Nearly two weeks late it invaded the air but
then what is two weeks to life herself? On a cool night there is
a break from the struggle of becoming. I suppose that's why we
sleep. In a childhood story they spoke of the land of enchant-
ment." We crawl to it, we short-lived mammals, not realizing that
we are already there. To the gods the moon is the entire moon
but to us it changes second by second because we are always fish
in the belly of the whale of earth. We are encased and can't stray
from the house of our bodies. I could say that we are released,
but I don't know, in our private night when our souls explode
into a billion fragments then calmly regather in a black pool in
the forest, far from the cage of flesh, the unremitting "I." This was
a dream and in dreams we are forever alone walking the ghost
road beyond our lives. Of late I see waking as another chance at
spring. 

"Spring" by Jim Harrison, from Songs of Unreason. © Copper Canyon Press, 2011.

SAP'S RUNNING

SAP'S RUNNING
by Laura Rodley

The hearts of trees are sleeping,
But the sun’s warmth wakes them up
A fever from root to bud
A raging that froths the ground
Boiling bubbles, time to start
Tapping, collect their tears
Drink them as boiled sugar
Syrup for hot pancakes, sausage links. 

Mouse Dreams

The Country
by Billy Collins

I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice

might 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 thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding 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 creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time—

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country? 

"The Country" by Billy Collins, from Nine Horses: Poems. © Random House, 2003

Word for Today: obnubilate

obnubilate \ob-NOO-buh-leyt\, verb:

to cloud over; becloud; obscure.

...their trunks were black and knobbly, whilst their branches buckled over as a roof to meet a brick plane and obnubilate a view of the stars.
-- Colin Cornelius, Monkeys Can't Swim

It is the pity of the world, Dr Maturin, to see a man of your parts obnubilate his mind with the juice of the poppy.
-- Patrick O'Brian, The Mauritius Command

Obnubilate, a late 16th century word, is a verbal derivative of the Latin nūbilus meaning "cloudy," though its closer ancestor, obnūbilāre means "to darken."

The Origin of Language

The Origin of Language

Honda Pavarotti

Honda Pavarotti
by Tony Hoagland

I'm driving on the dark highway
when the opera singer on the radio
opens his great mouth
and the whole car plunges down the canyon of his throat.

So the night becomes an aria of stars and exit signs
as I steer through the galleries
of one dilated Italian syllable
after another. I love the passages in which

the rich flood of the baritone
strains out against the walls of the esophagus,
and I love the pauses
in which I hear the tenor's flesh labor to inhale

enough oxygen to take the next plummet
up into the chasm of the violins.
In part of the song, it sounds as if the singer
is being squeezed by an enormous pair of tongs

while his head and legs keep kicking.
In part of the song, it sounds as if he is
standing in the middle of a coliseum,
swinging a 300-pound lion by the tail,

the empire of gravity
conquered by the empire of aerodynamics,
the citadel of pride in flames
and the citizens of weakness
celebrating their defeat in chorus,

joy and suffering made one at last,
joined in everything a marriage is alleged to be,
though I know the woman he is singing for
is dead in a foreign language on the stage beside him,
though I know his chain mail is made of silver-painted plastic
and his mismanagement of money is legendary,
as I know I have squandered
most of my own life

in a haze of trivial distractions,
and that I will continue to waste it.
But wherever I was going, I don't care anymore,
because no place I could arrive at

is good enough for this, this thing made out of experience
but to which experience will never measure up.
And that dark and soaring fact
is enough to make me renounce the whole world

or fall in love with it forever. 

"Honda Pavarotti" by Tony Hoagland, from Donkey Gospel. © Graywolf Press, 1998

Billy Collins' Birthday

March 22 is the birthday of the best-selling poet Billy Collins, (books by this author) born in Queens, New York (1941). He thinks that too much modern poetry lacks humor. He said: "It's the fault of the Romantics, who eliminated humor from poetry. Shakespeare's hilarious, Chau-cer's hilarious. The Romantics killed off humor, and they also eliminated sex, things which were replaced by landscape. I thought that was a pretty bad trade-off, so I'm trying to write about humor and landscape, and occasionally sex."

He was in his 40s when he published his first book, The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988), and he has become one of the country's most popular poets. His book Sailing Alone Around the Room (2000) has sold almost 200,000 copies, more than any other book of poetry in this century. His collection Ballistics came out in 2008.



Introduction to Poetry

by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

"Introduction to Poetry" by Billy Collins, from The Apple That Astonished Paris. © University of Arkansas Press, 1996

From The Writer's Almanac

Word For the Day: boustrophedon

boustrophedon \boo-struh-FEED-n\, noun:

an ancient method of writing in which the lines run alternately from right to left and from left to right.

This, they call the boustrophedon form because it mimics the back-and-forth pacing of an ox tied to a tether.
-- Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

Elsa suddenly recalls a word from the recesses of her memory: boustrophedon, scripts written in alternating directions.
-- Jennifer Vanderbes, Easter Island 

This ancient form of writing is named for an ancient form of farming and literally translates as "to turn like an ox while plowing." Derived from the Greek boûs for "ox," and strophē meaning "to turn," boustrophedon describes a snake-like motion in which a line of text doubles back on itself as it descends a page.

Five White Birds

Five White Birds
by Catharine Savage Brosman

Having seared the sky, the sun—a brazier—
smolders through the crumbling clouds
upriver; to the east, rich mounds of smoky
vapors, signifying rain tomorrow, drift on.
Five white birds rise suddenly, fanned out,
flushing from a maze of roofs and gardens

well below my windows, topping mushroom-
rounded oak trees and the heady sycamores.
Riding on contingency, the birds with ease
glide upward, bodies turned to movement,
backlit from the final sun rays on the scrim
of sky and thought, as flashes of pure being—

foreseeing, passing, leaving all one ecstasy.
Drawing light against the indigo of evening,
they separate a moment, fingers spreading
from a palm, then close together to compact
their various motions into one white wedge,
which flies along the river now, accentuating

giant cranes, the beaks of freighters moored
among the Harmony Street wharves. I watch
the light reflected on sleek forms, which dip,
then disappear, a note, a point, a nothingness.
The swept effect remains, a smoothing-over
of asperities, a pentimento that refines the day,

its painted infelicities recolored in the silver
twilight. So one is, and is not, what has passed,
windy patterns on deep, loamy grasses, stilled
at dusk, a watermark of images upon the mind,
wings beating for a glassy moment in desire—
a gesture's meaning as the shaken air resounds.

Five White Birds by Catharine Savage Brosman • from Under the Pergola • Louisiana State University Press

Gun Suicide & Homicide

Extracted from “The Hidden Brain” by Shankar Vedantam

Public Health researcher John Violanti compared the risk of suicide in three stressful professions: police officers, firefighters and military personnel.  He studied 8.5 million death certificates in 28 states.  Military personnel and police officers had four times the risk as firefighters; black police officers had five times the risk; and white women police officers twelve times the risk.  The central difference was that police officers and military personnel carry guns and firefighters don’t.  The guns didn’t cause the suicide but provided a means.

From the American Journal of Epidemiology Volume 160 Issue 10 November 15, 2004 Linda L. Dahlberg, Robin M. Ikeda, and Marcie-jo Kresnow: Guns in the Home and Risk of aViolent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study.

Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home. They were also at greater risk of dying from a firearm homicide, but risk varied by age and whether the person was living with others at the time of death. The risk of dying from a suicide in the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in the home. Persons with guns in the home were also more likely to have died from suicide committed with a firearm than from one committed by using a different method . Results show that regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.

From "The Hidden Brain"

People who have guns in their homes are at greater risk of being shot and killed than people who do not have guns.  They are not safer as a result of owning a gun.  The combined risk of accidents, suicide and domestic violence dwarfs the risk of homicide in the hands of a stranger.  Each year in the US nearly twice as many people kill themselves as are murdered.

The Fish

The Fish
by Billy Collins

As soon as the elderly waiter
placed before me the fish I had ordered,
it began to stare up at me
with its one flat, iridescent eye.

I feel sorry for you., it seemed to say,
eating alone in this awful restaurant
bathed in such unkindly light
and surrounded by these dreadful murals of Sicily.

And I feel sorry for you, too—
yanked from the sea and now lying dead
next to some boiled potatoes in Pittsburgh—
I said back to the fish as I raised my fork.

And thus my dinner in an unfamiliar city
with its rivers and lighted bridges
was graced not only with chilled wine
and lemon slices but with compassion and sorrow

even after the waiter removed my plate
with the head of the fish still staring
and the barrel vault of its delicate bones
terribly exposed, save for a shroud of parsley. 

"The Fish" by Billy Collins, from Ballistics. © Random House, 2010.