So at the moment in my English Literature class, we're studying am American poet called Billy Collins. We're reading a selection of poems entitles 'Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes', and I just can't believe how much I genuinely like his work. I used to really dislike poetry but there's something about his writing that's really nice, its not complicated, it's easy to understand: You don't need a degree in English Literature to know what he's going on about. Its just really pretty so I thought I would share some of my favourites here.
Man In Space
All you have to do is listen to the way a man
sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people
and notice how intent he is on making his point
even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver,
and you will know why the women in science
fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own
are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine
when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,
why they are always standing in a semicircle
with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,
their breasts protected by hard metal disks.
Passengers
At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats
with the possible company of my death,
this sprawling miscellany of people -
carry-on bags and paperbacks -
that could be gathered in a flash
into a band of pilgrims on the last open road.
Not that I think
if our plane crumpled into a mountain
we would all ascend together,
holding hands like a ring of skydivers,
into a sudden gasp of brightness,
or that there would be some common place
for us to reunite to jubilize the moment,
some spaceless, pillar less Greece
where we could, at the count of three,
toss out ashes into the sunny air.
It's just that the way that man has his briefcase
so carefully arranged,
the war that girl is cooling her tea,
and the flow of the comb that woman
passes through her daughter's hair ...
and when you consider that altitude,
the secret parts of the engines,
and all the hard water and the deep canyons below ...
well, I just think it would be good if one of us
maybe stood up and said a few words,
or, so as not to involved the police,
at least quietly wrote something down.
Vade Mecum
I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table to be perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry.
Wolf
A wolf is reading a book of fairy tales.
The moon hangs over the forest, a lamp.
He is not assuming a human position,
say, cross-legged against a tree,
as he would in a cartoon.
This is a real wolf, standing on all fours,
his rich fur bristling in the night air,
his head bent over the book open on the ground.
He does not sit down, for the words
would be too far away to be legible,
and it is with difficulty that he turns
each page with his nose and forepaws.
When he finishes the last tale
he lies down in pine needles.
He thinks about what he has read,
the stories passing over his mind
like the clouds crossing the moon.
A zigzag of wind shakes down hazelnuts.
The eyes of owls yellow in the branches.
The wolf now paces restlessly in circles
around the book until he is absorbed
by the power of it't narration,
making him one of it's illustrations,
a small paper wolf, flat as print.
Later that night, lost in a town of pigs,
he knocks over houses with his breath.
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