Whale Day Quotes

“It’s overwhelming to think of all the things
I’m not doing today, including being born.”
― Billy Collins, Whale Day: And Other Poems

“She’s painfully slow, so I often have to stop and wait while she examines some roadside weeds as if she were reading the biography of a famous dog. And she’s not a pretty sight anymore, dragging one of her hind legs, her coat too matted to brush or comb, and a snout white as a marshmallow. We usually walk down a disused road that runs along the edge of a lake, whose surface trembles in a high wind and is slow to ice over as the months grow cold. We don’t walk very far before she sits down on her worn haunches and looks up at me with her rheumy eyes. Then it’s time to carry her back to the car. Just thinking about the honesty in her eyes, I realize I should tell you she’s not really seventy-five. She’s fourteen. I guess I was trying to appeal to your sense of the bizarre, the curiosities of the sideshow. I mean who really cares about another person’s dog? Everything else I’ve said is true, except the part about her being fourteen. I mean she’s old, but not that old, and it’s not polite to divulge the true age of a lady.”
― Billy Collins, Whale Day: And Other Poems

“Time and time again Billy Collins takes a mundane situation and spirals it out into something that is by turns humorous and poignant as in his poem "Imperial Garden", one of my favorites in this new collection:
It was at the end of dinner,
the two of us in a red booth
maintaining our silence,
when I decided to compose a message
for the fortune cookie you were soon to receive.

Avoid mulishness when choosing
a position on the great board game of life

was my mean-spirited contribution
to the treasury of Confucian wisdom.

But while we waited for the cookies,
the slices of oranges,
and the inescapable pot of watery tea,
I realized that by mulishness
I meant your refusal to let me
have my own way every time I wanted it.

I watched you looking off to the side—
your mass of dark hair,
your profile softened by lamplight—
and then I made up a fortune for myself.

He who acts like a jerk
on an island of his own creation
will have only the horizon for a friend.

I seemed to be getting worse at this,
I seemed to be getting worse at this,
I thought, as the cookies arrived at the table
along with the orange slices
and a teapot painted with tigers
menacingly peering out from the undergrowth.

The restaurant was quiet then.
The waiter returned to looking out at the street,
a zither whimpered in the background,

and we turned to our cookies,
cracking the brittle shells,
then rolling into little balls
the tiny scrolls of our destinies
before dropping them, unread, into our cups of tea—
a little good-luck thing we’d been doing ever since we met.”
― Billy Collins, Whale Day: And Other Poems

“But having sailed some time ago
Into the quiet cardigan harbour of my life,”
― Billy Collins, Whale Day: And Other Poems