A Narrow Fellow

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;

Billy Collins

Billy Collins is a native New Yorker and is an English professor. He was named Poet Laureate for the United States (2001-2003). He has written numerous books of poetry collections, and I like his writing.

After the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, he was asked by the U.S. Library of Congress to write a poem about that day. He wrote a poem titled The Names. He read the poem the following year at a special joint session of the United States Congress. Since then, he will not include that poem in any of his readings, nor will he include it in any of his published collections:

The Names

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name –
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner –
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O’Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening — weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds –
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

Other Billy Collins poems I enjoy:

Fishing On The Susquehanna In July

Child Development

I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakey's Version Of "Three Blind Mice"

(Just to pique your interest...)

And what he says about poetry:

All babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too." ~ Billy Collins, The Washington Post, 2007

I like that.

A Poem:

I have had this poem on my refrigerator for years.
I guess it "speaks" to me...

In The Evening
by Billy Collins

The heads of the roses begin to droop,
The bee who has been hauling his gold
all day finds a hexagon in which to rest.

In the sky, traces of clouds,last few darting birds,
watercolors on the horizon.

The white cat sits facing a wall.

The horse in the field is asleep on its feet.

I light a candle on the wood table.
I take another sip of wine.
I pick up an onion and a knife.
And the past and the future?
Nothing but an only child with two different masks.

More on Mr. Collins, tomorrow.

Wordless Wednesday

In Sync with Nature

About this time each year, the sides of our barn begin moving in orange waves as the sun warms the panels. Little beetle armies. Our upstairs bedrooms experience infiltrations of...ladybugs. THOUSANDS of ladybugs. Some people think these bugs are cute. They're not. They bite. They stain orange. They overwinter if one is not vigilant. Even when one IS vigilant, the window sills can sport dead ladybug bodies on any given morning.

Yes -it IS ick.

Why does this phenomenon occur? I have been told that somebody at our local university, in all their wisdom, released ladybugs years ago, in order to create a predator for some other local bug/aphid/who-knows-what.

All I know now is that my household and barnhold are left experiencing this annual legacy.

I am not sure one should tamper with nature.

Look at Australia's problem with cane toads. These giant amphibians were intentionally introduced to the island (yes, Australia is an island) to curb the cane beetles which were eating, of course, cane. Sugar cane. Before 1935, Australia did not have any "toad" species of its own. Wallaby, kangaroo, platypus: yes. Toads? No. Someone brought some cane toads over from Hawaii and released the toads, to take care of the beetle population. And the toads flourished in their new environment. The cane beetle lives high up on the cane. The cane toad can't jump very high, say, about two feet. So instead of feasting on tasty cane beetles, the cane toad feeds on frogs, bird eggs, and bugs other than...cane beetles. Oh, and let me mention that the cane toad is poisonous, so any would-be predators to it are killed, as well. Other than brush fires, Australia's biggest menace to nature and animals are invasive species - and the cane toad is the biggest-known threat.

So, we could say that was a big Oops.

I'm thinking our ladybug population is a big Oops, too.

And how about that New York rat population? A few years ago (or more) someone decided to intentionally introduce possums into the rat-infested neighborhoods of New York. Wow. I might like to have been a fly on the subway wall for that one; years ago I had a Swiss neighbor who, apparently, had never seen a possum before. Late one afternoon I heard screaming from our back yard. That was odd and very unsettling. Small town Oklahoma neighborhoods do not often experience SCREAMING like I heard that day. I ran out back to see my horrified neighbor. "A RAT! A RAT!", she screamed. I looked down into the holly bushes where she was pointing, and omigoodness: "Claudia, honey-pie, that's not a rat. That's a very, very large possum".

I cannot imagine how the city folk in NYC reacted when they saw THEIR first possum.

And those possums, anyway? They didn't go after the rats as was anticipated. They went after the trash and crap in the New York streets and alleyways. Nature is a delicate balance, and if you go and throw a possum where it's not supposed to be, then it tilts the balance all over the place and not only do you have rats to contend with, but garbage-eating possums, too.

And so now all I am reading about is bedbugs. That's a double-ICK. First of all, I did not realize they are as big as they are; about 4mm x2.5 mm. That's the size of a regular tick! I thought bedbugs were little, tiny, microscopic and very nearly imaginary bugs. I have always ended our kids' bedtime goodnights with:

Goodnight!

Sleep tight!

Don't let the bedbugs

Bite,

Bite,

Bite!

But they're not tiny and not imaginary. They are real, and living well in NYC.

So...what's a predator of the bedbug? Centipede. Fire ant.

Let's not go there, you wannabe entymologists.

"The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated."

~ Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970), Saturday Review, June 8, 1963.

So divinely is the world organized that every one of us, in our place and time, is in balance with everything else.

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe