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Reading Billy Collins in the Bath
I am reading you in the bath
and you are doing that thing again,
making me want to laugh then strangle you,
not just because the little factual paragraph
on the typeface used in your perfect book
is better than most poems I write,
nor because, thanks to a CD I bought,
I hear your lugubrious voice sounding
every syllable like a soft and distant bell,
but mostly because after a few pages,
the mundane in the bathroom, and in all
the rooms in this old house, begins to resonate
like some small but perfect oriental poem.
For instance, my wife just came in
and as she spoke about lunch
a sudden lick of sunshine fell across
her face like a dazzling Arab veil.
I am wishing for a squadron of tanks
to knock the village down, or an aircraft
to fall from the sky like a bird arrowed
at the breast, so I can say
‘Stick that in your pipe Billy Collins’,
but I suppose even from such an event,
tender gold would be spun like thread
at the end of day: birds would sing a tattoo,
and the voices of all those still alive beyond
the immediate wreckage area of these
imaginary catastrophes would look up
at their stars, and quietly go to sleep.
Hugh McMillan is a poet from South West Scotland, widely published and anthologised. He blogs at Dark Mutterings from Drumsleet.
qarrtsiluni 