Poetry Walk Despite the cold days and long nights ahead, winter inspires its own humor, joys, and memories. Te 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 specifc 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 Americas 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. Poetry for Every Season developed in partnership with Poetry Society of America Call 718.362.9561 Press 846# Mobile Media sponsored by Winter Poetry for Every Season developed in partnership with Poetry Society of America 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 geese complaining in the vast sky, fying over the living and the dead, schools and prisons, and the whitened felds. 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 somehow with the snow that is coming down this morning, how the notes and the spaces accompany its easy falling on the geometry of the ground, on the fagstone path, the slanted roof, and the angles of the split-rail fence as if he had imagined a winter scene as he sat at the piano late one night at the Five Spot playing Ruby, My Dear. Ten again, its the kind of song that would go easily with rain or a tumult of leaves, and for that matter its a snow that could attend an adagio for strings, the best of the Ronettes, or George Torogood and the Destroyers. It falls so indiferently into the spacious white parlor of the world, if I were sitting here reading in silence, reading the morning paper or reading Being and Nothingness, not even letting the spoon touch the inside of the cup, I have a feeling the snow would go perfectly with that. Billy Collins Poetry for Every Season developed in partnership with Poetry Society of America Call 718.362.9561 Press 847# Mobile Media sponsored by Snow Day Today we woke up to a revolution of snow, its white fag 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 ofce lost under the noiseless drif, the paths of trains sofly blocked, the world fallen under this falling. In a while, I will put on some boots and step out like someone walking in water, and the dog will porpoise through the drifs, and I will shake a laden branch sending 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 tea and 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 Childrens School, closed, the Hi-Ho Nursery School, closed, along withsome 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 Tumb Child Center, all closed, andclap your handsthe Peanuts Play School. So this is where the children hide all day. Tese 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 hard in 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 From Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems, Billy Collins. Used by permission of Chris Calhoun Agency. Poetry for Every Season developed in partnership with Poetry Society of America Call 718.362.9561 Press 848# Mobile Media sponsored by A History of Weather It is the kind of spring morningcandid sunlight elucidating the air, a fower-rufing 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 clouds that are now sweeping over this house into the next state, and every chapter will step backwards in time to illustrate the rain that fell on battlefelds and the winds that attended beheadings, coronations. Te snow furries of Victorian London will be surveyed along with the gales that blew of Renaissance caps. Te tornadoes of the Middle Ages will be explicated and the long, overcast days of the Dark Ages. Tere will be a section on the frozen nights of antiquity and on the heat that shimmered in the deserts of the Bible. Te study will be hailed as ambitious and defnitive, for it will cover even the climate before the Flood when showers moistened Eden and will conclude with the mysteries of the weather before history when unseen clouds drifed over an unpeopled world, when not a soul lay in any of earths meadows gazing up at the passing of enormous faces and animal shapes, his jacket bunched into a pillow, an open book on his chest. Billy Collins From Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems, Billy Collins. Used by permission of Chris Calhoun Agency. Poetry for Every Season developed in partnership with Poetry Society of America Call 718.362.9561 Press 849# Mobile Media sponsored by 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 fnally to work alone under a lamp as if everything depended on this, groping blindly down a page, like someone lost in a forest. And to think it all began one night on the steps of a nunnery where 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 anything including my recent abandonment but it was there that I committed my frst act of self-expression, sticking out my infant tongue and receiving in return (I can see it now) a large, pristine snowfake much like any other. Billy Collins From Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems, Billy Collins. Used by permission of Chris Calhoun Agency. Poetry for Every Season developed in partnership with Poetry Society of America Picnic, Lightning My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three. Lolita It is possible to be struck by a meteor or a single-engine plane while reading in a chair at home. Safes drop from roofops and fatten the odd pedestrian mostly within the panels of the comics, but still, we know it is possible, as well as the fash of summer lightning, the thermos toppling over, spilling out on the grass. And we know the message can be delivered from within. Te heart, no valentine, decides to quit afer lunch, the power shut of like a switch, or a tiny dark ship is unmoored into the fow of the bodys rivers, the brain a monastery, defenseless on the shore. Tis is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fll the long fower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Ten the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like fakes of a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Ten the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifed faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next. Billy Collins From Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems, Billy Collins. Used by permission of Chris Calhoun Agency. Poetry for Every Season developed in partnership with Poetry Society of America Call 718.362.9561 Press 850# Mobile Media sponsored by While Eating a Pear From Te Art of Drowning, 1995. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Afer we have fnished 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 pass without the names of Norse and Roman gods. Time will go by the way it did before history, pure and unnoticed, a mystery that arose between the sun and moon before there was a word for dawn or moon or midnight, before there were names for the earths uncountable things, when fruit hung anonymously from scattered groves of trees, light on one smooth green side, shadow on the other. Billy Collins Poetry for Every Season developed in partnership with Poetry Society of America Shoveling Snow with Buddha Billy Collins From Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems, Billy Collins. Used by permission of Chris Calhoun Agency. Poetry for Every Season developed in partnership with Poetry Society of America Call 718.362.9561 Press 851# Mobile Media sponsored by In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok you would never see him doing such a thing, tossing the dry snow over the mountain of his bare, round shoulder, his hair tied in a knot, a model of concentration. Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word for 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 disappear and become lost to each other in these sudden clouds of our own making, these fountain-bursts of snow. Tis is so much better than a sermon in church, I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling. Tis 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 snow as if it were the purpose of existence, as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway you could back the car down easily and drive of into the vanities of the world with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio. All morning long we work side by side, me with my commentary and he inside the generous pocket of his silence, until the hour is nearly noon and the snow is piled high all around us; then, I hear him speak. Afer this, he asks, can we go inside and play cards? Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table while you shufe the deck, and our boots stand dripping by the door. Aaah, says the Buddha, lifing his eyes and leaning for a moment on his shovel before he drives the thin blade again deep into the glittering white snow. Winter Syntax From Te Apple Tat Astonished Paris, 1988, 1996. Used with permission of Te Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of the University of Arkansas. A sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight, tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat fapping behind him. Tere are easier ways of making sense, the connoisseurship of gesture, for example. You hold a girls face in your hands like a vase. You lif a gun from the glove compartment and toss it out the window into the desert heat. Tese cool moments are blazing with silence. Te full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses it it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning outside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afernoon in a corner of the couch. Bare branches in winter are a form of writing. Te 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 bootprints on the white hills and the white foors of valleys, a message for feld mice and passing crows. At dawn he will spot the vine of smoke rising from your chimney, and when he stands before 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 Poetry for Every Season developed in partnership with Poetry Society of America Love Te boy at the far end of the train car kept looking behind him as if he were afraid or expecting someone and then she appeared in the glass door of the forward car and he rose and opened the door and let her in and she entered the car carrying a large black case in the unmistakable shape of a cello. She looked like an angel with a high forehead and somber eyes and her hair was tied up behind her neck with a black bow. And because of all that, he seemed a little awkward in his happiness to see her, whereas she was simply there, perfectly existing as a creature with a sof face who played the cello. And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have lef the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lif the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack, I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifes him as God. Billy Collins From Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems, Billy Collins. Used by permission of Chris Calhoun Agency. Poetry for Every Season developed in partnership with Poetry Society of America Call 718.362.9561 Press 852# Mobile Media sponsored by Grand Central By permission of the author. Te city orbits around eight million centers of the universe and turns around the golden clock at the still point of this place. Lif up your eyes from the moving hive and you will see time circling under a vault of stars and know just when and where you are. Billy Collins Poetry for Every Season developed in partnership with Poetry Society of America Call 718.362.9561 Press 853# Mobile Media sponsored by As I sat on the sunny side of train #241 looking out the window at the Hudson River, topped with a riot of ice, it appeared to the untrained eye that the train was whizzing north along the rails that link New York City and Niagara Falls. But as the winter light glared of the white river and the snowy felds, I knew that I was as motionless as a man on a couch and that the things I was gazing at with afection, I should add were really the ones that were doing the moving, running as fast as they could on their invisible legs in the opposite direction of the train. Te rocky ledges and trees, blue oil drums and duck blinds, water towers and fashing puddles were dashing forever from my view, launching themselves from the twigs of the moment into the open sky of the past. How unfair of them, it struck me, as they persisted in their fight evergreens and electrical towers, the swing set, a slanted fence, a tractor abandoned in a feld how unkind of them to fee from me, to forsake an admirer such as myself, a devotee of things their biggest fan, you might say. Had I not taken a hounds interest in this world, tipped my hat to the frst magpie, shouted up to the passing geese? Had I not stopped enough times along the way to stare diligently into the eye of a roadside fower? Still, as I sat there between stations on the absolutely stationary train somewhere below Albany, I was unable to hide my wonderment at the uniformity of their purpose, at the kangaroo-like sprightliness of their exits. I pressed my face against the glass as if I were leaning on the window of a vast store devoted to the purveyance of speed. Te club car would open in ffeen minutes, came the announcement just as a trestle bridge went fying by. Albany Billy Collins From Nine Horses: Poems, Billy Collins. Used by permission of Chris Calhoun Agency. Poetry for Every Season developed in partnership with Poetry Society of America In the club car that morning I had my notebook open on my lap and my pen uncapped, looking every inch the writer right down to the little writers frown on my face, but there was nothing to write about except life and death and the low warning sound of the train whistle. I did not want to write about the scenery that was fashing 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 drawing over and over again the face of a motorcyclist in profle 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 visible as it broke over the bikers face the way it was breaking over the face of the locomotive that was pulling me toward Omaha and whatever lay beyond Omaha for me, all the other stops to make before the time would arrive to stop for good. We must always look at things from 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 us as 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 fre, speed lines coming of his shoulders and his book, and the woman standing on a beach studying the curve of horizon, even the child asleep on a summer night, speed lines fying from the posters of her bed, from the white tips of the pillow cases, and from the edges of her perfectly motionless body. Velocity Billy Collins From Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems, Billy Collins. Used by permission of Chris Calhoun Agency. Poetry for Every Season developed in partnership with Poetry Society of America Call 718.362.9561 Press 854# Mobile Media sponsored by Keats in New York By permission of the author. On the 6 train rocketing under the streets, I am looking forward to nothing so much as the sight of the ceramic beavers that distinguish the walls of the Astor Place station. Such time without end is gathered in their unwearied forepaws clutching a tree trunk and the buckteeth forever gnawing never to taste the bark, never to fade away. Billy Collins Poetry for Every Season developed in partnership with Poetry Society of America Te Brooklyn Museum of Art I will now step over the sof velvet rope and walk directly into this massive Hudson River painting and pick my way along the Palisades with this stick I snapped of a dead tree. I will skirt the smoky, nestled towns and seek the path that leads always outward until I become lost, without a hope of ever fnding the way back to the museum. I will stand on the blufs in nineteenth-century clothes, a dwarf among rock, hills, and fowing water, and I will fsh from the banks in a straw hat which will feel like a brush stroke on my head. And I will hide in the green covers of forests so no appreciator of Frederick Edwin Church, leaning over the sof velvet rope, will spot my tiny fgure moving in the stillness and cry out, pointing for the others to see, and be thought mad and led away to a cell where 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 draws my steps toward the misty vanishing point. Billy Collins From Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems, Billy Collins. Used by permission of Chris Calhoun Agency. Poetry for Every Season developed in partnership with Poetry Society of America Call 718.362.9561 Press 855# Mobile Media sponsored by Winter in Utah Te road across a wide snowy valley could not have been straighter if someone had drawn it with a ruler which someone probably did on a table in a surveyors ofce a century ago with a few other men looking over his shoulder. Were out in the middle of nowhere, you said, as we bisected the whitened felds 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, afer you unfolded a map of the state. But that night, afer speeding on sleds down a road of ice, the sky packed with stars, and the headlights of our hosts truck blazing behind, it seemed we had come a little closer to somewhere. And in the morning with the snow sparkling and the rough white mountains looming, a magpie fashed up from a fence post, all black and white in its airy exertions, and I said good morning to him on this frst day of the new decade all of which lef me to wonder if 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. 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