Questions About Angels by Billy Collins

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 through afternoons in a canoe.
    Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
    I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
    and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
    flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
    and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.
    As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
    letting my memory rush over them like water
    rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
    I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
    where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
    a dance whose name we can only guess.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following magazines in which many of these poems, some in earlier versions, have appeared: ACM, Black Warrior Review, Boulevard, Field, The Florida Review, Free Lunch, The Georgia Review, The Jacaranda Review, The Kansas Quarterly, Oxford Magazine, The Paris Review, Pearl, Slow Dancer, The Wooster Review, Wordsmith, The Wormwood Review.
    â€œThe Afterlife,” “American Sonnet,” “The Death of Allegory,” “First Reader,” “Forgetfulness,” “The History of Weather,” “Mappamundi,” and “Student of Clouds” first appeared in Poetry.
    The author gratefully acknowledges the National Endowment for the Arts and the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program of the City University of New York for their generous support.

Billy Collins is the author of five books of poetry, including Picnic, Lightning, The Art of Drowning —a finalist for the 1996 Lenore Marshall Prize, and The Apple That Astonished Paris. Collins's poetry has appeared in anthologies, textbooks, and a variety of periodicals, including Poetry, American Poetry Review, American Scholar, Harper's, Paris Review , and The New Yorker. His work has been featured in the Pushcart Prize anthology and The Best American Poetry for 1992, 1993, and 1997. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has also won the Bess Hokin Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize, the Oscar Blumenthal Prize, and the Levinson Prize—all awarded by Poetry magazine. In 1992, he was chosen by the New York Public Library to serve as a “Literary Lion.” He has given readings at numerous colleges and other institutions. For several years he has conducted summer poetry workshops in Ireland at