The Apple That Astonished Paris

Poems

Billy Collins

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781557288233
• eBook ISBN: 9781610750226
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Bruce Weber in the New York Times called Billy Collins "the most popular poet in America." He is the author of many books of poetry, including, most recently, The Rain in Portugal: Poems.

In 1988 the University of Arkansas Press published Billy Collins's The Apple That Astonished Paris, his "first real book of poems," as he describes it in a new, delightful preface written expressly for this new printing to help celebrate both the Press's twenty-fifth anniversary and this book, one of the Press's all-time best sellers. In his usual witty and dry style, Collins writes, "I gathered together what I considered my best poems and threw them in the mail." After "what seemed like a very long time" Press director Miller Williams, a poet as well, returned the poems to him in the "familiar self-addressed, stamped envelope." He told Collins that there was good work here but that there was work to be done before he'd have a real collection he and the Press could be proud of: "Williams's words were more encouragement than I had ever gotten before and more than enough to inspire me to begin taking my writing more seriously than I had before."

This collection includes some of Collins's most anthologized poems, including "Introduction to Poetry," "Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House," and "Advice to Writers." Its success over the years is testament to Collins's talent as one of our best poets, and as he writes in the preface, "this new edition . . . is a credit to the sustained vibrancy of the University of Arkansas Press and, I suspect, to the abiding spirit of its former director, my first editorial father."

II

HOME

BOOKS

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, panelled 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.

ON CLOSING ANNA KARENINA

I must have started reading this monster

a decade before Tolstoy was born

but the vodka and the suicide are behind me now,

all the winter farms, ice-skating and horsemanship.

It consumed so many evenings and afternoons,

I thought a Russian official would appear

to slip a medal over my lowered head

when I reached the last page.

But I found there only the last word,

a useless looking thing, stalled there,

ending its sentence and the whole book at once.

With no more plot to nudge along and nothing

to unfold, it is the only word with no future.

It stares into space and chants its own name

as a traveler whose road has just vanished

might stare into the dark, vacant fields ahead,

knowing he cannot go forward, cannot go back.

INDOORS

I lose perspective in national museums

wandering through the nest of rooms.

I forget that history is a long scroll

floating over a smoky battlefield.

When I bend over a glass case to inspect

the detail on an engraved shield,

I stop at a curlicue as if it were everything.

Then in the rare books room I am mesmerized

by little illustrations in the margins

of dictionaries, ink pictures of a lizard, a kayak.

Lost down a corridor of suits of armor,

I cannot find the daylight of an exit

or even an airy room of outdoor paintings,

no blue sky and white clouds in a gold frame.

Maybe it is time to return to the beginning

of knowledge, to relearn everything quietly,

to open an alphabet book and say to myself,

lips moving silently, A is for Apple.

DEATH

In the old days news of it traveled by foot.

An aproned woman would wave to her husband

as he receded down the lane, hauling

the stone of the message.

Or someone would bring it out by horse,

a boy galloping, an old man trotting along.

A girl would part a curtain wondering

what anyone would be doing here at this hour,

as he dismounted, hitched the beast to a post,

then lifted the brass knocker, cold as the night.

But today we have the telephone.

You can hear one from where you are right now,

its hammer almost touching the little bell,

ready to summon you, ready to fall from your hand.

REMEMBERING DREAMS

No one seems to be a champ at this.

We lift from the pillow a head flickering

with the light from an unlikely scene:

we are driving backwards down a highway in space

or searching a house with cockeyed walls for a door,

or stairs, and running into the face of a dead uncle.

But the rest of the story vanishes

as if someone had ripped an ancient epic from our hands

leaving us with a fragment, a few hexameters

whose rhythm is drowned out by the beat of daylight.

Just as well we salvage ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• I. AWAY
• II. HOME
• About the Author