Free Aimless Love by Billy Collins Page B

School Girl
    Do you realize that if you had started
    building the Parthenon on the day you were born
    you would be all done in only one more year?
    Of course, you couldn’t have done it alone,
    so never mind, you’re fine just as you are.
    You are loved simply for being yourself.
    But did you know that at your age Judy Garland
    was pulling down $150,000 a picture,
    Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory,
    and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room?
    No wait, I mean he had invented the calculator.
    Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life
    after you come out of your room
    and begin to blossom, or at least pick up all your socks.
    For some reason, I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey
    was Queen of England when she was only fifteen,
    but then she was beheaded, so never mind her as a role model.
    A few centuries later, when he was your age,
    Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family
    but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies,
    four operas, and two complete Masses as a youngster.
    But of course that was in Austria at the height
    of romantic lyricism, not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.
    Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15
    or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?
    We think you are special by just being you,
    playing with your food and staring into space.
    By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,
    but that doesn’t mean he
never
helped out around the house.
Animal Behavior
    Among the animals who avoid danger
    just by being still,
    the heron is a favorite example,
    indistinguishable from the reeds
    he stands in, thin and gray, at the water’s edge.
    Then there is the snowy egret
    who must think he can make
    his white question mark of a body
    just vanish from the lake
    by being as motionless as can be.
    And when it comes to people
    there’s the quiet man at the bar
    who lifts his eyes only now and then
    as well as the girl in the summer dress
    who must pretend she is not here.
    And who am I to talk,
    the last flamingo to leave the party,
    good at avoiding danger so far,
    away from any cove or shore,
    conspicuous as the drink I carry out the door.
Lincoln
    Whatever it was that just flew out of my head
    did not leave a trace,
    not a contrail in the sky
    not a footprint in a field of new snow.
    The last thing I remember
    is reading a sentence
    in a long biography of Abraham Lincoln,
    something about his face being so ugly
    it became beautiful
    in the eyes of Walt Whitman,
    but there was something after
    that made me fold down the corner
    of the page and close the book—
    so much I cannot think of today,
    a team of white birds lifting off a shoreline
    and disappearing into the sun.
Note to Antonín Dvorák
    Maestro, I am writing to tell you
    that your serenade in D minor
    with its stretches of martial confidence
    then some sweet wanderings of the woodwinds
    has not really brought me to the edge of anything,
    yet compared to the inane movie
    being shown on this long flight to Seattle,
    listening to your music has made me a better
    person than that other self,
    so slack of jaw and fishy of stare,
    who would have watched the movie to its end
    oblivious to the startling 33,000 feet of air below.
    I never visited your tomb in Prague
    or even the site of your former apartment
    on East 17th Street before it was demolished
    to make room for a hospital for sufferers from AIDS.
    So I am thanking you here for the lift
    of a tune to ride with over the clouds
    high above towns bisected by roads,
    and fields with their plowed circles.
    You remind me of a canary
    I once stared at for an unusually long time
    and the communion that developed between us
    as we gazed into and out of the unhooded cage.
    Time well spent, I thought,
    as the bird broke it off and began to peck
    at the image of his twin in a little oval mirror,
    leaving me to return to the many ways
    we have concocted to waste our lives—
    ten thousand at least, wouldn’t you say,
    Maestro, with