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On Not Finding You at Home Usually you appear at the front door when you hear my steps on the gravel, but today the door was closed, not a wisp of pale smoke from the chimney. I peered into a window but there was nothing but a table with a comb, some yellow flowers in a glass of water and dark shadows in the corners of the room. I stood for a while under the big tree and listened to the wind and the birds, your wind and your birds, your dar..
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me
poetry
waiting
you
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Billy Collins |
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Thank-You Notes Under the vigilant eye of my mother I had to demonstrate my best penmanship By thanking Uncle Gerry for the toy soldiers- Little red members of the Coldstream Guards- And thanking Aunt Helen for the pistol and holster, But now I am writing other notes Alone at a small cherry desk with a breeze coming in an open window, thanking everyone I happen to see on my long walk to the post office today and anyone who ever gave me dir..
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poetry
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Billy Collins |
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a18de70
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You, Reader I wonder how you are going to feel when you find out that I wrote this instead of you, that it was I who got up early to sit in the itchen and mention with a pen the rain-soaked windows, the ivy wallpaper, and the goldfish circling in its bowl. Go ahead and turn aside, bite your lip and tear out the page, but, listen- it was just a matter of time before one of us happened to notice the unlit candles and the clock humming on the..
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poetry
reader
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Billy Collins |
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And the past and the future? Nothing but an only child with two different masks.
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Billy Collins |
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In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok you would never see him doing such a thing, tossing the dry snow over the mountain of his bare, round shoulder, his hair tied in a knot, a model of concentration. Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word for what he does, or does not do. Even the season is wrong for him. In all his manifestations, is it not warm and slightly humid? Is this not implied by his serene expression, ..
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Billy Collins |
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Hangover If I were crowned emperor this morning, every child who is playing Marco Polo in the swimming pool of this motel, shouting the name Marco Polo back and forth Marco Polo Marco Polo would be required to read a biography of Marco Polo--a long one with fine print--as well as a history of China and of Venice, the birthplace of the venerated explorer Marco Polo Marco Polo after which each child would be quizzed by me then executed by dro..
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Billy Collins |
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It might interest you to know, speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, that I am the sound of rain on the roof. I also happen to be the shooting star, the evening paper blowing down an alley and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.
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Billy Collins |
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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,
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Billy Collins |
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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.
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Billy Collins |
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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.
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Billy Collins |
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This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of infancy, part a literary calculation,
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Billy Collins |
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are we just avoiding our one true destiny when we do that, averting our glance from Philip Larkin who waits for us in an undertaker's coat?
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Billy Collins |
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It was getting late in the year, the sky had been low and overcast for days, and I was drinking tea in a glassy room with a woman without children, a gate through which no one had entered the world. She was turning the pages of an expensive book on a coffee table, even though we were drinking tea, a book of colorful paintings-- a landscape, a portrait, a still life, a field, a face, a pear and a knife, all turning on the table. Men had ente..
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feminism
woman
womanhood
women
women-without-children
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Billy Collins |
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The boy at the far end of the train car kept looking behind him as if he were afraid or expecting someone
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Billy Collins |
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My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon, weekdays, particularly Wednesday. This is how I go about it: I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door. Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only a white shirt, a pair of pants, and a pot of cold tea. Then I remove my flesh and hand it over a chair. I slide if off my bones like a silken garment. I do th..
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Billy Collins |