Free Nine Horses by Billy Collins Page B

a single wooden match
    between the needles of his teeth?
    Who could not see him rounding a corner,
    the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
    the sudden flare, and the creature
    for one bright, shining moment
    suddenly thrust ahead of his time—
    now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer
    in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
    illuminating some ancient night.
    Who could fail to notice,
    lit up in the blazing insulation,
    the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
    of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
    of what once was your house in the country?

Velocity
    In the club car that morning I had my notebook
    open on my lap and my pen uncapped,
    looking every inch the writer
    right down to the little writer’s frown on my face,
    but there was nothing to write about
    except life and death
    and the low warning sound of the train whistle.
    I did not want to write about the scenery
    that was flashing past, cows spread over a pasture,
    hay rolled up meticulously—
    things you see once and will never see again.
    But I kept my pen moving by drawing
    over and over again
    the face of a motorcyclist in profile—
    for no reason I can think of—
    a biker with sunglasses and a weak chin,
    leaning forward, helmetless,
    his long thin hair trailing behind him in the wind.
    I also drew many lines to indicate speed,
    to show the air becoming visible
    as it broke over the biker’s face
    the way it was breaking over the face
    of the locomotive that was pulling me
    toward Omaha and whatever lay beyond Omaha
    for me and all the other stops to make
    before the time would arrive to stop for good.
    We must always look at things
    from the point of view of eternity,
    the college theologians used to insist,
    from which, I imagine, we would all
    appear to have speed lines trailing behind us
    as we rush along the road of the world,
    as we rush down the long tunnel of time—
    the biker, of course, drunk on the wind,
    but also the man reading by a fire,
    speed lines coming off his shoulders and his book,
    and the woman standing on a beach
    studying the curve of horizon,
    even the child asleep on a summer night,
    speed lines flying from the posters of her bed,
    from the white tips of the pillowcases,
    and from the edges of her perfectly motionless body.

“More Than a Woman”
    Ever since I woke up today,
    a song has been playing uncontrollably
    in my head—a tape looping
    over the spools of the brain,
    a rosary in the hands of a frenetic nun,
    mad fan belt of a tune.
    It must have escaped from the radio
    last night on the drive home
    and tunneled while I slept
    from my ears to the center of my cortex.
    It is a song so cloying and vapid
    I won’t even bother mentioning the title,
    but on it plays as if I were a turntable
    covered with dancing children
    and their spooky pantomimes,
    as if everything I had ever learned
    was being slowly replaced
    by its slinky chords and the puffballs of its lyrics.
    It played while I watered the plant
    and continued when I brought in the mail
    and fanned out the letters on a table.
    It repeated itself when I took a walk
    and watched from a bridge
    brown leaves floating in the channels of a current.
    In the late afternoon it seemed to fade,
    but I heard it again at the restaurant
    when I peered in at the lobsters
    lying on the bottom of an illuminated
    tank which was filled to the brim
    with their copious tears.
    And now at this dark window
    in the middle of the night
    I am beginning to think
    I could be listening to music of the spheres,
    the sound no one ever hears
    because it has been playing forever,
    only the spheres are colored pool balls,
    and the music is oozing from a jukebox
    whose lights I can just make out through the clouds.

Aimless Love
    This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
    I fell in love with a wren
    and later in the day with a mouse
    the cat had dropped under the dining room table.
    In the shadows of an autumn evening,
    I fell for a seamstress
    still at her machine in the tailor’s