The Millennial Pedestrian

In 1988 Billy Collins published his first book of poems, The Apple that Astonished Paris. It was recently reissued by The University of Arkansas Press in a paperback edition that you might want to pick up. Although we are used to Collins’s voice by now (and some are even getting a little bit tired of it), it’s worth reading these poems from the perspective of someone coming to them for the first time back in those far-off days. How fresh, direct and heartfelt, how inventive, humorous and accessible the poems are, how uncomplicated and yet how responsive to the mad complex gyrations of the human heart and mind they are.

In "Books," a poem from this collection, Collins writes about reading, and in doing so takes us into the process, reconnecting us with our very first experiences — a parent reading to us while our minds form vivid pictures of what we’re hearing. I’ve found that I tend to read much too fast now — it seems I’m always in a great rush to finish one book so I can start the next one. Collins’s poem reminds me that the speed of spoken speech — that of our mothers reading to us by the bed — is the speed at which we have time to absorb and react to the story, the characters and the power of the words themselves.

Take the time to read "Books" to yourself, out loud.

Books

    By Billy Collins

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,
Giovani 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.

I picture a figure in the act of reading,
shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,
a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie
as the suicide of lovers saturates a page,
or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.
He moves from paragraph to paragraph
as if touring a house of endless, paneled rooms.

I hear the voice of my mother reading to me
from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,
and inside her voice lie other distant sounds,
the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,
a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.
I watch myself building bookshelves in college,
walls within walls, as rain soaks New England,
or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow;

when evening is shadowing the forest
and small birds flutter down to consume the crumbs,
we have to listen hard to hear the voices
of the boy and his sister receding into the woods.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 27th, 2006.
It's part of the Prose category.
Feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of the page.
You can be alerted via RSS when a comment on this post is made.
You can get an email when a new piece of writing is added to the site.