June 17, 2016

Billy Collins

MAY DAY

That was the day we made love
in a room without a bed,
a room of tall windows and a rose ceiling,
and then we moved outside
and sat there on a high deck
watching the pelicans dive into the waves
as we drank chilled white wine,
and after a little while
I put a finger in your hair and twirled it,
and you smiled and kept looking at the sea.
 
It must have been almost seven
when I found the car keys and kissed you
because you said you would make us
a really interesting dinner
if I picked up some things at the market.
 
And the blue sky was still illuminated
as I walked across the parking lot
and through the electric doors,
for the days of the year
were now increasing by the minute,

and I will not soon forget how,
after I had filled the basket
with two brook trout,
asparagus, lemons, and parsley,
rum-raisin ice cream, and a watermelon,
the check-out girl—
no more than a junior in high school—
handed me the change
and told me I should have a nice day.

from Rattle #51, Spring 2016

__________

Billy Collins: “‘May Day’ is one of many poems of mine that was inspired by an irritant, in this case, those persistent and empty words we hear on leaving a store: yes, I mean ‘Have a nice day.’ But here, rather than being annoyed, the speaker is struck by the irony that the happy-face wish was delivered during the progress of the kind of ‘nice’ day the cashier is probably too young to even imagine.”

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May 11, 2015

Billy Collins

FIVE HAIKU

Slicing strawberries
this morning, I’m suddenly
slicing strawberries!
 
 
 
 
A twig in its beak,
a bird disappears into
the town’s noon siren.
 
 
 
 
One more dead calm day—
I listen to the wind chimes
I smacked with a broom.
 
 
 
 
He may compare you
to the dawn, but I
stayed up all night to watch it.
 
 
 
 
In the summer sky
a cloud with its mouth open
eats a smaller cloud.

from Rattle #47, Spring 2015
Tribute to Japanese Forms

__________

Billy Collins: “I follow the seventeen syllable limit because it provides me with a pleasurable feeling of push-back, a resistance to whatever literary whims I may have at the time. If you want to create a little flash of illumination, the haiku tells us, start by counting on your fingers. A three-line poem with a frog is not necessarily a haiku.”

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