Billy Collins

I read a review quite a while ago that called Billy Collins accessible. I looked up his book, Sailing alone around the room, on Amazon.com and almost clicked on Purchase. But I'm too tight to buy a book of poems sight unseen. I copied down a poem by Robert Bly once that means a lot to me, but others by him that I have read just don't resonate with me. (You can read, "She doesn't understand them" there if you want to.) Even when I saw a copy of Nine Horses by Billy Collins in one of my catalogs for only $3.98, I hesitated. But I ordered it, and I'm so glad that I did. After I've read a few, it feels like every thing that happens to me in a day is a little poem that I ought to be able to write. But I can't, darn it. Vivid and mischievous, lonely and sad, friendly and funny--the poems make you feel not so alone in the world. Here is an example: "Ink strokes on rice paper--/a wooden bridge/curved over a river,/mountains in the distance, and in the foreground/a wind-blown tree. /I rotate the book on the table/so the tree/is leaning toward your village." Now, wasn't that fun?

Poets

I don't read poetry enough. I really love it, but it's more work. Therefore a key word for me in a poetry review is "accessible". I don't think I'm a stupid woman, but probably not an overly clever one either. Simplicity is a concept I'm always chasing. What good, really, is a jumble of words that mostly just sound good? How clever are you if you haven't made what you felt and experienced clear to me?

Pet peeve

Is it because I am an older person that I miss so much dialogue in movies and television because of the throbbing, soaring LOUD music that is playing over it? It used to be called "background" music. Or do younger people with better ears hear mostly music too? Are we meant to catch just a word or two and surmise the rest, using our imaginations rather than the writer's? I am a language lover, a word person. I don't like it.

Postscript

The little yellow butterfly is lying flat and still this morning on the baseboard heater under the windows.

The little yellow butterfly

I don't know how it came in. It seems unlikely that it flew in the door with us. I take most of my houseplants outside somewhere in the summer and bring them in again in the fall. Maybe it was hiding among the leaves of one of them, waiting for winter to bring the end of its life. Or maybe it was in a cocoon wrapped around one of the branches. When it came into my nice warm house it thought spring was here already. Maybe it was on one of the days when my husband had gotten chilled outside and cranked the heat until I got all sweaty. However it happened, we have a little yellow butterfly living in our house. It mostly sits on the wood frame of our big front windows and looks out. I don't know what to do for it. It doesn't seem like much of a life for a butterfly. Do butterflies eat and drink? This one doesn't. But there wouldn't seem to be much future for a little yellow butterfly out in the snow. So I just watch it. Sometimes, when I'm sitting in my chair in front of the windows, I think, "Where is the little yellow butterfly? Oh, there it is." Last night I couldn't see it. Then Bear bumped into the window frame and suddenly there it was, gliding across the room.