Sailing Alone Around the Room

by Billy Collins

The Lesson In the morning when I found History snoring heavily on the couch, I took down his overcoat from the rack and placed its weight over my shoulder blades. It would protect me on the cold walk into the village for milk and the paper and I figured he would not mind, not after our long conversation the night before. How unexpected his blustering anger when I returned covered with icicles, the way he rummaged through the huge pockets making sure no major battle or English queen had fallen out and become lost in the deep snow.

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

Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.

From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

Introduction to Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to water-ski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

Schoolsville Glancing over my shoulder at the past, I realize the number of students I have taught is enough to populate a small town. I can see it nestled in a paper landscape, chalk dust flurrying down in winter, nights dark as a blackboard. The population ages but never graduates. On hot afternoons they sweat the final in the park and when it’s cold they shiver around stoves reading disorganized essays out loud. A bell rings on the hour and everybody zigzags into the streets with their books. I forgot all their last names first and their first names last in alphabetical order. But the boy who always had his hand up is an alderman and owns the haberdashery. The girl who signed her papers in lipstick leans against the drugstore, smoking, brushing her hair like a machine. Their grades are sewn into their clothes like references to Hawthorne. The A’s stroll along with other A’s. The D’s honk whenever they pass another D. All the creative-writing students recline on the courthouse lawn and play the lute. Wherever they go, they form a big circle. Needless to say, I am the mayor. I live in the white colonial at Maple and Main. I rarely leave the house. The car deflates in the driveway. Vines twirl around the porch swing. Once in a while a student knocks on the door with a term paper fifteen years late or a question about Yeats or double-spacing. And sometimes one will appear in a windowpane to watch me lecturing the wallpaper, quizzing the chandelier, reprimanding the air.

A History of Weather It is the kind of spring morning—candid sunlight elucidating 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 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 battlefields and the winds that attended beheadings, coronations. The snow flurries of Victorian London will be surveyed along with the gales that blew off Renaissance caps. The tornadoes of the Middle Ages will be explicated and the long, overcast days of the Dark Ages. There will be a section on the frozen nights of antiquity and 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 Flood when showers moistened Eden and will conclude with the mysteries of the weather before history when unseen clouds drifted over an unpeopled world, when not a soul lay in any of earth’s meadows gazing up at the passing of enormous faces and animal shapes, his jacket bunched into a pillow, an open book on his chest.

The Man in the Moon He used to frighten me in the nights of childhood, the wide adult face, enormous, stern, aloft. I could not imagine such loneliness, such coldness. But tonight as I drive home over these hilly roads I see him sinking behind stands of winter trees and rising again to show his familiar face. And when he comes into full view over open fields he looks like a young man who has fallen in love with the dark earth, a pale bachelor, well-groomed and full of melancholy, his round mouth open as if he had just broken into song.

The History Teacher Trying to protect his students’ innocence he told them the Ice Age was really just the Chilly Age, a period of a million years when everyone had to wear sweaters. And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age, named after the long driveways of the time. The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more than an outbreak of questions such as “How far is it from here to Madrid?” “What do you call the matador’s hat?” The War of the Roses took place in a garden, and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan. The children would leave his classroom for the playground to torment the weak and the smart, mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses, while he gathered up his notes and walked home past flower beds and white picket fences, wondering if they would believe that soldiers in the Boer War told long, rambling stories designed to make the enemy nod off.

Nostalgia Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult. You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade, and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular, the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework. Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon, and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.” Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today. Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone. Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room. We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang. These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code. The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big. People would take walks to the very tops of hills and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking. Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft. We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs. It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead. I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821. Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits. And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment, time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps, or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me recapture the serenity of last month when we picked berries and glided throu...

Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyed camera eager to eat the world one monument at a time?

But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm, heavy paw on my chest, and I can only close my eyes and listen to the drums of woe throbbing in the distance and the sound of my wife’s laughter on the telephone in the next room,

It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I would shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.