Ballistics by Billy Collins Page B

I was busy riding the marble,
    as the lurkers like to put it,
    talking to Marco Polo,
    juggling turtles,
    going through the spin cycle,
    or—my favorite, if I had to have one—out of milk.

The Four-Moon Planet
    I have envied the four-moon planet.
    —
The Notebooks of Robert Frost
    Maybe he was thinking of the song
    “What a Little Moonlight Can Do”
    and became curious about
    what a lot of moonlight might be capable of.
    But wouldn’t this be too much of a good thing?
    and what if you couldn’t tell them apart
    and they always rose together
    like pale quadruplets entering a living room?
    Yes, there would be enough light
    to read a book or write a letter at midnight,
    and if you drank enough tequila
    you might see eight of them roving brightly above.
    But think of the two lovers on a beach,
    his arm around her bare shoulder,
    thrilled at how close they were feeling tonight
    while he gazed at one moon and she another.

Evasive Maneuvers
    I grew up hiding from the other children.
    I would break off from the pack
    on its patrol of the streets every Saturday
    and end up alone behind a hedge
    or down a dim hallway in a strange basement.
    No one ever came looking for me,
    which only added to the excitement.
    I used to hide from adults, too,
    mostly behind my mother’s long coat
    or her floral dress depending on the season.
    I tried to learn how to walk
    between my father’s steps while he walked
    like the trick poodle I had seen on television.
    And I hid behind books,
    usually one of the volumes of the encyclopedia
    that was kept behind glass in a bookcase,
    the letters of the alphabet in gold.
    Before I knew how to read,
    I sat in an armchair in the living room
    and turned the pages, without a clue
    about the worlds that were pressed
    between D and F, M and O, W and Z.
    Maybe this explains why
    I looked out the bedroom window
    first thing this morning
    at the heavy trees, low gray clouds,
    and said the word
gastropod
out loud,
    and having no idea what it meant
    went downstairs and looked it up
    then hid in the woods from my wife and our dog.

August
    The first one to rise on a Sunday morning,
    I enter the white bathroom
    trying not to think of Christ or Wallace Stevens.
    It’s before dawn and the road is quiet,
    even the birds are silent in the heat.
    And standing on the tile floor,
    I open a little nut of time
    and nod to the cold water faucet,
    with its chilled beaded surface
    for cooling my wrists and cleansing my face,
    and I offer some thanks
    to the electricity swirling in the lightbulbs
    for showing me the toothbrush and the bottle of aspirin.
    I went to grammar school for Jesus
    and to graduate school for Wallace Stevens.
    But right now, I want to consider
    only the water and the light,
    always ready to flow and spark at my touch,
    and beyond the wonders of this white room—
    the reservoir high in the mountains,
    the shore crowded with trees,
    and the dynamo housed in a colossus of brick,
    its bright interior, and up there,
    a workman smoking alone on a catwalk.

The Poems of Others
    Is there no end to it
    the way they keep popping up in magazines
    then congregate in the drafty orphanage of a book?
    You would think the elm would speak up,
    but like the dawn it only inspires—then more of them appear.
    Not even the government can put a stop to it.
    Just this morning, one approached me like a possum,
    snout twitching, impossible to ignore.
    Another looked out of the water at me like an otter.
    How can anyone dismiss them
    when they dangle from the eaves of houses
    and throw themselves in our paths?
    Perhaps I am being harsh, even ridiculous.
    It could have been the day at the zoo
    that put me this way—all the children by the cages—
    as if only my poems had the right to exist
    and people would come down from the hills
    in the evening to view them in rooms of white marble.
    So I will take the advice of the mentors
    and put this in a drawer for a week
    maybe even a year or two and then have a calmer look at