#billy collins

[sashayed]

Marijuana

When I was young and dreamy, I longed to be a poet, not one with his arms wrapped around the universe or on his knees before a goddess, not waving from Mount Parnassus nor wearing a cape like Lord Byron, rather just reporting on a dog or an orange. But one soft night in California I walked outside during a party, lay down on the lawn, beneath a lively sky and after an interlude of nonstop gazing, I happened to swallow the moon, yes, I opened my mouth in awe and swallowed the full moon whole. And the moon dwelled within me when I returned to the lights of the party, where I was welcomed back with understanding and hilarity and was recognized long into the night as The Man Who Swallowed the Moon, he who had walked out of a storybook and was dancing now with a girl in the kitchen.

Billy Collins Water, Water, 2024

[apoemaday]

Nightclub

by Billy Collins

You are so beautiful and I am a fool to be in love with you is a theme that keeps coming up in songs and poems. There seems to be no room for variation. I have never heard anyone sing I am so beautiful and you are a fool to be in love with me, even though this notion has surely crossed the minds of women and men alike. You are so beautiful, too bad you are a fool is 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 afternoon I am listening to Johnny Hartman whose dark voice can curl around the concepts of love, beauty, and foolishness like no one else’s can. It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette someone left burning on a baby grand piano around three o'clock in the morning; smoke that billows up into the bright lights while out there in the darkness some of the beautiful fools have gathered around little tables to listen, some with their eyes closed, others leaning forward into the music as 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 is watching the large man with the tenor sax that hangs from his neck like a golden fish. He moves forward to the edge of the stage and hands the instrument down to me and nods that I should play. So I put the mouthpiece to my lips and blow into it with all my living breath. We are all so foolish, my long bebop solo begins by saying, so damn foolish we have become beautiful without even knowing it.

[sicknessinmotion]

on forgetting & remembering. / billy collins — nick flynn — gwendolyn brooks — alex dimitrov — ocean vuong.

[havingapoemwithyou]

while eating a pear by billy collins

[solar-settings]

elegy, billy collins // lottie & nat, yellowjackets

[llovelymoonn]

billy collins

[a-ramblinrose]

But here I am at the vanishing point. . .

[dabiconcordia]

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking. He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark that he barks every time they leave the house. They must switch him on on their way out. The neighbors' dog will not stop barking. I close all the windows in the house and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast but I can still hear him muffled under the music, barking, barking, barking, and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra, his head raised confidently as if Beethoven had included a part for barking dog. When the record finally ends he is still barking, sitting there in the oboe section barking, his eyes fixed on the conductor who is entreating him with his baton while the other musicians listen in respectful silence to the famous barking dog solo, that endless coda that first established Beethoven as an innovative genius. by Billy Collins

[bones-ivy-breath]

Litany by Billy Collins

[april-is]

April 8, 2024: As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse, Billy Collins

As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse Billy Collins

I pick an orange from a wicker basket and place it on the table to represent the sun. Then down at the other end a blue and white marble becomes the earth and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.

I get a glass from a cabinet, open a bottle of wine, then I sit in a ladder-back chair, a benevolent god presiding over a miniature creation myth,

and I begin to sing a homemade canticle of thanks for this perfect little arrangement, for not making the earth too hot or cold not making it spin too fast or slow

so that the grove of orange trees and the owl become possible, not to mention the rolling wave, the play of clouds, geese in flight, and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.

Then I fill my glass again and give thanks for the trout, the oak, and the yellow feather,

singing the room full of shadows, as sun and earth and moon circle one another in their impeccable orbits and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.

--

Also: Seeing the Eclipse in Maine, Robert Bly

Enjoy today's eclipse, North America!

More space-related poems.

Today in:

2023: Neither Time Nor Grief is a Flat Circle, Christina Olson 2022: Pippi Longstocking, Sandra Simonds 2021: Waking After the Surgery, Leila Chatti 2020: Gutbucket, Kevin Young 2019: Insomnia, Linda Pastan 2018: How Many Nights, Galway Kinnell 2017: The Little Book of Hand Shadows, Deborah Digges 2016: Now I Pray, Kathy Engel 2015: Why I’m Here, Jacqueline Berger 2014: Snow, Aldo, Kate DiCamillo 2013: from The Escape, Philip Levine 2012: Thirst, Mary Oliver 2011: Getting Away with It, Jack Gilbert 2010: *turning, Annie Guthrie 2009: I Don’t Fear Death, Sandra Beasley 2008: The Dover Bitch, Anthony Hecht 2007: Death Comes To Me Again, A Girl, Dorianne Laux 2006: Up Jumped Spring, Al Young 2005: Old Women in Eliot Poems, David Wright

[fishingforwords]

what else am i forgetting?

fernando pessoa, the book of disquiet: the complete edition || arturo ferrari, in the old street vicolo san bernardino alle ossa a milano || madisen kuhn, please don't go before i get better || james bay, let it go || imagine dragons, i was me || holly black, the cruel prince || amazon || billy collins, forgetfulness || salvador dali, disintegration of the persistence of memory

[apoemaday]

The Lanyard

by Billy Collins

The other day as I was ricocheting slowly off the blue walls of this room bouncing from typewriter to piano from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor, 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 more suddenly into the past. A past where I sat at a workbench at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake learning how to braid thin plastic strips into a lanyard. A gift for my mother. I had never seen anyone use a lanyard. Or wear one, if that’s 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 teaspoons of medicine to my lips, set cold facecloths on my forehead 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 archaic truth, that you can never repay your mother, but the rueful admission that when she took the two-toned lanyard from my hands, 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.”

[extollingtheeveryday]

Billy Collins // "November"

[havingapoemwithyou]

today by billy collins

[fadeintoyou1993]

"the art of drowning" by billy collins (poetry october 1991)

[orchard-bliss]

Billy Collins, “Connect With Strangers Through Form”; Reading And Writing Poetry; (Masterclass.com).