Free Ballistics by Billy Collins Page A

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August in Paris
    I have stopped here on the rue des Écoles
    just off the boulevard St-Germain
    to look over the shoulder of a man
    in a flannel shirt and a straw hat
    who has set up an easel and a canvas chair
    on the sidewalk in order to paint from a droll angle
    a side-view of the Church of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
    But where are you, reader,
    who have not paused in your walk
    to look over my shoulder
    to see what I am jotting in this notebook?
    Alone in this city,
    I sometimes wonder what you look like,
    if you are wearing a flannel shirt
    or a wraparound blue skirt held together by a pin.
    But every time I turn around
    you have fled through a crease in the air
    to a quiet room where the shutters are closed
    against the heat of the afternoon,
    where there is only the sound of your breathing
    and every so often, the turning of a page.

   
one
     

Brightly Colored Boats Upturned
on the Banks of the Charles
    What is there to say about them
    that has not been said in the title?
    I saw them near dawn from a glassy room
    on the other side of that river,
    which flowed from some hidden spring
    to the sea; but that is getting away from
    the brightly colored boats upturned
    on the banks of the Charles,
    the sleek racing sculls of a college crew team.
    They were beautiful in the clear early light—
    red, yellow, blue and green—
    is all I wanted to say about them,
    although for the rest of the day
    I pictured a lighter version of myself
    calling time through a little megaphone,
    first to the months of the year,
    then to the twelve apostles, all grimacing
    as they leaned and pulled on the long wooden oars.

Searching
    I recall someone once admitting
    that all he remembered of
Anna Karenina
    was something about a picnic basket,
    and now, after consuming a book
    devoted to the subject of Barcelona—
    its people, its history, its complex architecture—
    all I remember is the mention
    of an albino gorilla, the inhabitant of a park
    where the Citadel of the Bourbons once stood.
    The sheer paleness of her looms over
    all the notable names and dates
    as the evening strollers stop before her
    and point to show their children.
    These locals called her Snowflake,
    and here she has been mentioned again in print
    in the hope of keeping her pallid flame alive
    and helping her, despite her name, to endure
    in this poem where she has found another cage.
    Oh, Snowflake,
    I had no interest in the capital of Catalonia—
    its people, its history, its complex architecture—
    no, you were the reason
    I kept my light on late into the night
    turning all those pages, searching for you everywhere.

High
    On that clear October morning,
    I was only behind a double espresso
    and a single hit of anti-depressant,
    yet there, on the shore of the reservoir
    with its flipped-over rowboats,
    I felt like I was walking with Jane Austen
    to borrow the jargon of the streets.
    Yes, I was wearing the crown,
    as the drug addicts like to say,
    knitting a bonnet for Charlie,
    entertaining the troops,
    sitting in the study with H. G. Wells—
    so many ways to express that mood
    of royal goodwill
    when the gift of sight is cause enough for jubilation.
    And later in the afternoon
    when I finally came down,
    a lexicon was waiting for me there, too.
    In my upholstered chair by a window
    with dusk pouring into the room,
    I appeared to be doing nothing,
    but inside