Free Nine Horses by Billy Collins Page A

“Velocity”;
Five Points:

“Absence,” “Balsa,” “Bodhidharma,” “Lying in Bed in the Dark, I Silently
Address the Birds of Arizona”;
The Gettysburg Review:
“By a Swimming Pool
Outside Siracusa,” “Creatures”;
Green Mountains Review:
“Albany”;
Kenyon
Review:
“The Stare”;
New Delta Review:
“Surprise”;
The New Yorker:
“Earth”;
Oxford American:
“Death in New Orleans, A Romance,” “Nine Horses,”
“Tipping Point”;
Ploughshares:
“The Only Day in Existence”;
Poems and Plays:

“Bermuda”;
Poetry:
“Aimless Love,” “Christmas Sparrow,” “Elk River Falls,”
“Litany,” “ ‘More Than a Woman,’ ” “The Parade,” “Study in Orange and White,”
“Today,” “Writing in the Afterlife”;
Poetry New York:
“Ave Atque Vale”;
Third
Coast:
“Love”;
Tight:
“Colorado”;
Tin House:
“Rain”
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Collins, Billy.
Nine horses: poems / Billy Collins.—1st ed.
p.   cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-278-0
I. Title.
PS3553.O47478 N45 2002
811′.54—dc21        2002024868
    Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
    v3.1

FOR M ARY AND D ANIELLE ,
    DEARLY DEPARTED

A Note to the Reader About this Poetry eBook
    The way a poem looks on the page is a vital aspect of its being. The length of its lines and the poet’s use of stanza breaks give the poem a physical shape, which guides our reading of the poem and distinguishes it from prose.
    With an eBook, this distinct shape may be altered if you choose to take advantage of one of the functions of your eReader by changing the size of the type for greater legibility. Doing this may cause the poem to have line breaks not intended by the poet. To preserve the physical integrity of the poem, we have formatted the eBook so that any words that get bumped down to a new line in the poem will be noticeably indented. This way, you can still appreciate the poem’s original shape regardless of your choice of type size.

See, then, that bronze equestrian statue. The cruel rider has kept the bit in his horse’s mouth for two centuries. Unbridle him for a minute, if you please, and wash his mouth with water
.
    —Thomas De Quincey

Night Letter to the Reader
    I get up from the tangled bed and go outside,
    a bird leaving its nest,
    a snail taking a holiday from its shell,
    but only to stand on the lawn,
    an ordinary insomniac
    amid the growth systems of garden and woods.
    If I were younger, I might be thinking
    about something I heard at a party,
    about an unusual car,
    or the press of Saturday night,
    but as it is, I am simply conscious,
    an animal in pajamas,
    sensing only the pale humidity
    of the night and the slight zephyrs
    that stir the tops of the trees.
    The dog has followed me out
    and stands a little ahead,
    her nose lifted as if she were inhaling
    the tall white flowers,
    visible tonight in the darkened garden,
    and there was something else I wanted to tell you,
    something about the warm orange light
    in the windows of the house,
    but now I am wondering if you are even listening
    and why I bother to tell you these things
    that will never make a difference,
    flecks of ash, tiny chips of ice.
    But this is all I want to do—
    tell you that up in the woods
    a few night birds were calling,
    the grass was cold and wet on my bare feet,
    and that at one point, the moon,
    looking like the top of Shakespeare’s
    famous forehead,
    appeared, quite unexpectedly,
    illuminating a band of moving clouds.



The Country
    I wondered about you
    when you told me never to leave
    a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
    lying around the house because the mice
    might get into them and start a fire.
    But your face was absolutely straight
    when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
    where the matches, you said, are always stowed.
    Who could sleep that night?
    Who could whisk away the thought
    of the one unlikely mouse
    padding along a cold water pipe
    behind the floral wallpaper
    gripping