Billy Collins Poetry Anthology

Poetry for Every SeasonHoliday Train Show® Poetry Walk

Despite the cold days and long nights ahead, winter inspires its own humor, joys, and memories. The poetry of Billy Collins captures these moments and feelings in words. Sixteen of his poems appear in this Holiday Train Show® Poetry Walk, featuring trains, gardening, and the natural world. Collins writes about typical scenes, such as sweethearts on a Metro-North train, shoveling snow, or listening to school closings on the radio, which are specific to the season and to New York. Yet his words encourage us to examine the everyday in a new light.

Billy Collins, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, is regarded as America’s “most popular poet.” He is the author of many bestselling and acclaimed poetry collections, most recently Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2013). A New Yorker and the New York State Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006, Collins is a longtime professor at Lehman College in the Bronx and a tireless advocate for poetry outside of the classroom.

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Winter


A little heat in the iron radiator,the dog breathing at the foot of the bed,

and the windows shut tight,encrusted with hexagons of frost.

I can barely hear the geesecomplaining in the vast sky,

flying over the living and the dead,schools and prisons, and the whitened fields.

Billy Collins

By permission of the author.

Snow

From Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems, © Billy Collins. Used by permission of Chris Calhoun Agency.

I cannot help noticing how this slow Monk solo seems to go somehowwith the snowthat is coming down this morning,

how the notes and the spaces accompanyits easy fallingon the geometry of the ground, on the flagstone path,the slanted roof,and the angles of the split-rail fence

as if he had imagined a winter sceneas he sat at the pianolate one night at the Five Spotplaying “Ruby, My Dear.”

Then again, it’s the kind of songthat would go easily with rainor a tumult of leaves,

and for that matter it’s a snowthat could attend an adagio for strings,the best of the Ronettes,or George Thorogood and the Destroyers.

It falls so indifferentlyinto the spacious white parlor of the world,if I were sitting here reading

in silence,reading the morning paperor reading Being and Nothingness, not even letting the spoontouch the inside of the cup,I have a feelingthe snow would go perfectly with that.

Billy Collins



Snow DayToday we woke up to a revolution of snow,its white flag waving over everything,the landscape vanished,not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,and beyond these windows

the government buildings smothered,schools and libraries buried, the post office lostunder the noiseless drift,the paths of trains softly blocked,the world fallen under this falling.

In a while, I will put on some bootsand step out like someone walking in water,and the dog will porpoise through the drifts,and I will shake a laden branchsending a cold shower down on us both.

But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house,a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow.I will make a pot of teaand listen to the plastic radio on the counter,as glad as anyone to hear the news

that the Kiddie Corner School is closed,the Ding-Dong School, closed,the All Aboard Children’s School, closed,the Hi-Ho Nursery School, closed,along with—some will be delighted to hear—the Toadstool School, the Little School, Little Sparrows Nursery School,Little Stars Pre-School, Peas-and-Carrots Day School,the Tom Thumb Child Center, all closed, and—clap your hands—the Peanuts Play School.

So this is where the children hide all day.These are the nests where they letter and draw,where they put on their bright miniature jackets,all darting and climbing and sliding,all but the few girls whispering by the fence.

And now I am listening hardin the grandiose silence of the snow,trying to hear what those three girls are plotting,what riot is afoot,which small queen is about to be brought down.

Billy Collins




A History of Weather

It is the kind of spring morning—candid sunlightelucidating the air, a flower-ruffling breeze—that makes me want to begin a history of weather,a ten-volume elegy for the atmospheres of the past,the envelopes that have moved around the moving globe.

It will open by examining the cirrus cloudsthat are now sweeping over this house into the next state,and every chapter will step backwards in timeto illustrate the rain that fell on battlefieldsand the winds that attended beheadings, coronations.

The snow flurries of Victorian London will be surveyedalong with the gales that blew off Renaissance caps.The tornadoes of the Middle Ages will be explicatedand the long, overcast days of the Dark Ages.There will be a section on the frozen nights of antiquityand on the heat that shimmered in the deserts of the Bible.

The study will be hailed as ambitious and definitive, for it will cover even the climate before the Floodwhen showers moistened Eden and will concludewith the mysteries of the weather before historywhen unseen clouds drifted over an unpeopled world,when not a soul lay in any of earth’s meadows gazing upat the passing of enormous faces and animal shapes,his jacket bunched into a pillow, an open book on his chest.

Billy Collins




Foundling

How unusual to be living a life of continual self-expression,jotting down little things,noticing a leaf being carried down a stream,then wondering what will become of me,

and finally to work alone under a lampas if everything depended on this,groping blindly down a page,like someone lost in a forest.

And to think it all began one nighton the steps of a nunnerywhere I lay gazing up from a sewing basket,which was doubling for a proper baby carrier,

staring into the turbulent winter sky,too young to wonder about anythingincluding my recent abandonment—but it was there that I committed

my first act of self-expression,sticking out my infant tongueand receiving in return (I can see it now)a large, pristine snowflake much like any other.

Billy Collins

From Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems, © Billy Collins. Used by permission of Chris Calhoun Agency.


Picnic, LightningMy very photogenic mother died in a freak accident(picnic, lightning) when I was three. —Lolita

It is possible to be struck by a meteoror a single-engine planewhile reading in a chair at home.Safes drop from rooftopsand flatten the odd pedestrianmostly within the panels of the comics,but still, we know it is possible, as well as the flash of summer lightning,the thermos toppling over,spilling out on the grass.

And we know the messagecan be delivered from within.The heart, no valentine,decides to quit after lunch,the power shut off like a switch,or a tiny dark ship is unmooredinto the flow of the body’s rivers,the brain a monastery,defenseless on the shore.

This is what I think aboutwhen I shovel compostinto a wheelbarrow,and when I fill the long flower boxes,then press into rowsthe limp roots of red impatiens—the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forthfrom the sleeve of his voluminous cloak.

Then the soil is full of marvels,bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quickto burrow back under the loam.Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue,the clouds a brighter white,

and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edgeagainst a round stone,the small plants singingwith lifted faces, and the clickof the sundialas one hour sweeps into the next.

Billy Collins




While Eating a Pear

From The Art of Drowning, © 1995. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

After we have finished here,the world will continue its quiet turning,and the years will still transpire,but now without their numbers,and the days and months will passwithout the names of Norse and Roman gods.

Time will go by the way it didbefore history, pure and unnoticed,a mystery that arose between the sun and moonbefore there was a wordfor dawn or moon or midnight,

before there were names for the earth’suncountable things,when fruit hung anonymouslyfrom scattered groves of trees,light on one smooth green side,shadow on the other.

Billy Collins


Shoveling Snowwith Buddha

Billy Collins




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

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

Even the season is wrong for him.In all his manifestations, is it not warm and 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 disappearand become lost to each otherin 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 snowas if it were the purpose of existence, as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear drivewayyou could back the car down easilyand drive off into the vanities of the worldwith a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.

All morning long we work side by side,me with my commentaryand he inside the generous pocket of his silence,until the hour is nearly noonand 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 milkand bring cups of hot chocolate to the tablewhile you shuffle the deck,and our boots stand dripping by the door.

Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyesand leaning for a moment on his shovelbefore he drives the thin blade again deep into the glittering white snow.

Winter Syntax

From The Apple That Astonished Paris, © 1988, 1996.Used with permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of the University of Arkansas.

A sentence starts out like a lone travelerheading into a blizzard at midnight,tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.

There are easier ways of making sense,the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.You hold a girl’s face in your hands like a vase.You lift a gun from the glove compartmentand toss it out the window into the desert heat.These cool moments are blazing with silence.

The full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses itit becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaningoutside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afternoonin a corner of the couch.

Bare branches in winter are a form of writing.The unclothed body is autobiography.Every lake is a vowel, every island a noun.

But the traveler persists in his misery,struggling all night through the deepening snow,leaving a faint alphabet of bootprintson the white hills and the white floors of valleys,a message for field mice and passing crows.

At dawn he will spot the vine of smokerising from your chimney, and when he standsbefore you shivering, draped in sparkling frost,a smile will appear in the beard of icicles,and the man will express a complete thought.

Billy Collins


LoveThe boy at the far end of the train car kept looking behind himas if he were afraid or expecting someone

and then she appeared in the glass doorof the forward car and he roseand opened the door and let her in

and she entered the car carryinga large black casein the unmistakable shape of a cello.

She looked like an angel with a high foreheadand somber eyes and her hairwas tied up behind her neck with a black bow.

And because of all that,he seemed a little awkwardin his happiness to see her,

whereas she was simply there,perfectly existing as a creaturewith a soft face who played the cello.

And the reason I am writing thison the back of a manila envelopenow that they have left the train together

is to tell you that when she turnedto lift the large, delicate celloonto the overhead rack,

I saw him looking up at herand what she was doingthe way the eyes of saints are painted

when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.

Billy Collins




Grand Central


The city orbits around eight millioncenters of the universe

and turns around the golden clockat the still point of this place.

Lift up your eyes from the moving hiveand you will see time circling

under a vault of stars and knowjust when and where you are.

Billy Collins



As I sat on the sunny side of train #241looking out the window at the Hudson River,topped with a riot of ice,

it appeared to the untrained eyethat the train was whizzing north along the railsthat link New York City and Niagara Falls.

But as the winter light glaredoff the white river and the snowy fields,I knew that I was as motionless as a man on a couch

and that the things I was gazing at—with affection, I should add—were really the ones that were doing the moving,

running as fast as they couldon their invisible legsin the opposite direction of the train.

The rocky ledges and trees,blue oil drums and duck blinds,water towers and flashing puddles

were dashing forever from my view,launching themselves from the twigsof the moment into the open sky of the past.

How unfair of them, it struck me,as they persisted in their flight—evergreens and electrical towers,

the swing set, a slanted fence,a tractor abandoned in a field—how unkind of them to flee from me,

to forsake an admirer such as myself,a devotee of things—their biggest fan, you might say.

Had I not taken a hound’s interest in this world, tipped my hat to the first magpie,shouted up to the passing geese?

Had I not stopped enough times along the wayto stare diligently into the eye of a roadside flower?

Still, as I sat there between stationson the absolutely stationary trainsomewhere below Albany,

I was unable to hide my wondermentat the uniformity of their purpose,at the kangaroo-like sprightliness of their exits.

I pressed my face against the glassas if I were leaning on the windowof a vast store devoted to the purveyance of speed.

The club car would open in fifteen minutes,came the announcementjust as a trestle bridge went flying by.

AlbanyBilly Collins

From Nine Horses: Poems, © Billy Collins. Used by permission of Chris Calhoun Agency.


In the club car that morning I had my notebookopen on my lap and my pen uncapped,looking every inch the writerright down to the little writer’s frown on my face,

but there was nothing to write aboutexcept life and deathand the low warning sound of the train whistle.

I did not want to write about the scenerythat was flashing past, cows spread over a pasture,hay rolled up meticulously—things you see once and will never see again.

But I kept my pen moving by drawingover and over againthe face of a motorcyclist in profile—

for no reason I can think of—a biker with sunglasses and a weak chin, leaning forward, helmetless,his long thin hair trailing behind him in the wind.

I also drew many lines to indicate speed,to show the air becoming visibleas it broke over the biker’s face

the way it was breaking over the face of the locomotive that was pulling metoward Omaha and whatever lay beyond Omahafor me, all the other stops to make

before the time would arrive to stop for good.We must always look at thingsfrom the point of view of eternity,

the college theologians used to insist,from which, I imagine, we would all appear to have speed lines trailing behind usas we rush along the road of the world,

as we rush down the long tunnel of time—the biker, of course, drunk on the wind,but also the man reading by a fire,

speed lines coming off his shoulders and his book,and the woman standing on a beachstudying the curve of horizon,even the child asleep on a summer night,

speed lines flying from the posters of her bed,from the white tips of the pillow cases,and from the edges of her perfectly motionless body.

VelocityBilly Collins




Keats in New York


On the 6 train rocketing under the streets,I am looking forward to nothingso much as the sight of the ceramic beaversthat distinguish the walls of the Astor Place station.

Such time without end is gatheredin their unwearied forepaws clutching a tree trunkand the buckteeth forever gnawing–never to taste the bark, never to fade away.

Billy Collins


The BrooklynMuseum of ArtI will now step over the soft velvet ropeand walk directly into this massive Hudson Riverpainting and pick my way along the Palisadeswith this stick I snapped off a dead tree.

I will skirt the smoky, nestled townsand seek the path that leads always outwarduntil I become lost, without a hopeof ever finding the way back to the museum.

I will stand on the bluffs in nineteenth-century clothes,a dwarf among rock, hills, and flowing water,and I will fish from the banks in a straw hatwhich will feel like a brush stroke on my head.

And I will hide in the green covers of forestsso no appreciator of Frederick Edwin Church, leaning over the soft velvet rope, will spot my tiny figure moving in the stillnessand cry out, pointing for the others to see,

and be thought mad and led away to a cellwhere there is no vaulting landscape to explore,none of this birdsong that halts me in my tracks,and no wide curving of this river that drawsmy steps toward the misty vanishing point.

Billy Collins




Winter in Utah

The road across a wide snowy valleycould not have been straighterif someone had drawn it with a ruler

which someone probably did on a tablein a surveyor’s office a century agowith a few other men looking over his shoulder.

We’re out in the middle of nowhere, you said,as we bisected the whitened fields—a few dark bison here and there

and I remember two horses snorting by a shed—or maybe a little southwest of nowhere,you added, after you unfolded a map of the state.

But that night, after speeding on sledsdown a road of ice, the sky packed with stars,and the headlights of our host’s truck blazing behind,

it seemed we had come a little closer to somewhere.And in the morning with the snow sparklingand the rough white mountains looming,

a magpie flashed up from a fence post,all black and white in its airy exertions,and I said good morning to him

on this first day of the new decadeall of which left me to wonderif we had not arrived at the middle of exactly where we were.

Billy Collins

From Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems, © Billy Collins. Used by permission of Chris Calhoun Agency.



Billy Collins Poetry Anthology

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