Aimless Love

Copyright © 2013 by Billy Collins.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and the H
OUSE
colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

ISBN 978-0-679-64405-7
eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-8465-1

www.atrandom.com

Book design by Dana Leigh Blanchette
Title-page and part-title photograph: ©
iStockphoto.com

v3.1

Little soul

little stray

little drifter

now where will you stay

all pale and all alone

after the way

you used to make fun of things?

—Hadrian                                 

Looker, gazer, skimmer, skipper,

thumb-licking page turner, peruser,

you getting your print-fix for the day,

pencil-chewer, note taker, marginalianist

with your checks and X’s

first-timer or revisiter,

browser, speedster, English major,

flight-ready girl, melancholy boy,

invisible companion, thief, blind date, perfect stranger—

that is me rushing to the window

to see if it’s you passing under the shade trees

with a baby carriage or a dog on a leash,

me picking up the phone

to imagine your unimaginable number,

me standing by a map of the world

wondering where you are—

alone on a bench in a train station

or falling asleep, the book sliding to the floor.

I wondered about you

when you told me never to leave

a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches

lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.

But your face was absolutely straight

when you twisted the lid down on the round tin

where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?

Who could whisk away the thought

of the one unlikely mouse

padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper

gripping a single wooden match

between the needles of his teeth?

Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,

the sudden flare, and the creature

for one bright, shining moment

suddenly thrust ahead of his time—

now a fire-starter, now a torch-bearer

in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid

illuminating some ancient night.

Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,

the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces

of his fellow mice, one-time inhabitants

of what once was your house in the country?

In the club car that morning I had my notebook

open on my lap and my pen uncapped,

looking every inch the writer

right down to the little writer’s frown on my face,

but there was nothing to write about

except life and death

and the low warning sound of the train whistle.

I did not want to write about the scenery

that was flashing past, cows spread over a pasture,

hay rolled up meticulously—

things you see once and will never see again.

But I kept my pen moving by drawing

over and over again

the face of a motorcyclist in profile—

for no reason I can think of—

a biker with sunglasses and a weak chin,

leaning forward, helmetless,

his long thin hair trailing behind him in the wind.

I also drew many lines to indicate speed,

to show the air becoming visible

as it broke over the biker’s face

the way it was breaking over the face

of the locomotive that was pulling me

toward Omaha and whatever lay beyond Omaha

for me, all the other stops to make

before the time would arrive to stop for good.

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,

as we rush down the long tunnel of time—

the biker, of course, drunk on the wind,

but also the man reading by a fire,

speed lines coming off his shoulders and his book,

and the woman standing on a beach

studying the curve of horizon,

even the child asleep on a summer night,