The Night House
— Billy Collins
Every day the body works in the fields on the world
mending a stone wall
or swinging a sickle through the tall grass —
the grass of civics, the grass of money —
and every night the body curls around itself
and listens for the soft bells of sleep.
But the heart is restless and rises
from the body in the middle of the night,
leaves the trapezoidal bedroom
with its thick, pictureless walls
to sit by herself at the kitchen table
and heat some milk in a pan.
And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe
and goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,
and opens a book on engineering.
Even the conscience awakens
and roams from room to room in the dark,
darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.
And the soul is up on the roof
in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
singing a song about the wildness of the sea
until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they all will return to the sleeping body
the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,
resuming their daily colloquy,
talking to each other or themselves,
even through the heat of the long afternoons.
Which is why the body — that house of voices —
sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen
to stare into the distance,
to listen to all its names being called
before bending to its labor.
Comments
I'm beginning to think I share a lot of your tastes in poetry. And I'm really enjoying coming across the ones you share. In my old department, there would be weekly lunchtime poetry-sharing -- just a half-hour of people reading, out loud, a couple poems from their favorite authors, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Czeslaw Milosz to Dean Young. It's something I miss, which is why seeing what you and Amanda sometimes share is so enjoyable.
Posted by: Mike | March 2, 2005 10:36 AM
billy collins rocks my world. i don't have nearly enough scraps of his brilliance lying around, but every time someone finds and shares another, i'm charmed all over again. that's beautiful. and powerful. and reassuring, somehow... when everything seems to be caving in, it's liberating to think there are not only more outs than we know but that we're already taking them & just not doing the noticing perhaps we should...
Posted by: tyra | March 2, 2005 11:19 AM
Thanks, you two. All of the poems I've posted lately are mind/body poems, since that's something I currently have occasional to think a lot about. These were the first three that came to mind - I'll see what else pops up.
Posted by: Krista | March 2, 2005 10:23 PM