Read The Rain in Portugal Online
Authors: Billy Collins
The Rain in Portugal (7 page)
That many years ago she had a chance
to hear Yehuda Amichai
read his poems at a college in Santa Cruz,
but a boy had invited her to go for a walk
that would lead up a path into the nearby hills,
so she decided to go for the walk with the boy instead.
To have missed what turned out to be
her only chance to hear the great Israeli poet
filled her with regret to this day,
but she clearly remembered the walk,
especially the afternoon light on the green hills,
though by now she had forgotten the name of the boy.
I told her it sounded like she had the makings
of a poem there, what with Amichai,
the California light on the hills, and the forgotten boy.
Then I drove off through the dormant vineyards
wondering if the woman had ever written a poem herself
and, if not, why in the world would she want to start now?
It's not often that I see the sun rise
and set on the same day as I did the other day.
It's easy to tell which is which
even if you just emerged from a comaâ
the rising is a theatre of silvery air,
and the setting done and imbued by gold.
On the morning I'm thinking about
it rose over a low cluster of clouds
then burst forth and lit up the sunny side of everything.
And when it went down, it went down
in a cauldron of molten metal
and seemed to shudder in a foundry of its own making.
When I lay in the dark that night
I imagined the sun shining down on Asia,
always rising and setting somewhere
waking some people, sending others to bed
as it does in that love poem by John Donne.
And I thought of the sun advancing
in its own grander orbit, a father taking
the family of planets for a ride through the Milky Way.
What a brazen wonder to be alive on earth
amid the clockwork of all this motion!
This was in Key West. It was January
when the early morning hours can be chilly.
I remember putting on a sweater
then stepping out onto the deck
with the newspaper under my arm
and checking out the water and the sky
before lighting up a big El Stinko cigar.
for Suzannah
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author gratefully acknowledges the editors of the following periodicals where some of these poems first appeared.
American Poetry Review:
“Hendrik Goltzius's âIcarus' (1588),” “One Leg of the Journey,” “Under the Stars,” “Santorini,” “Only Child,” “Lucky Cat”
The Atlantic:
“The Five Spot, 1964”
Boulevard:
“Poem to the First Generation of People to Exist After the Death of the English Language”
Brilliant Corners:
“1960”
Five Points:
“Bravura,” “Helium,” “Dream Life,” “Fire,” “The Night of the Fallen Limb,” “Species”
Fulcrum:
“Muybridge's Lobsters”
The Irish Times:
“Bags of Time,” “Genuflection”
The Kenyon Review:
“Sixteen Years Old, I Help Bring in the Hay on My Uncle John's Farm with Two French-Canadian Workers”
The New Yorker:
“Tanager,” “Cosmology”
New Ohio Review:
“The Lake,” “The Present”
Plume:
“In Praise of Ignorance,” “Many Moons,” “Note to J. Alfred Prufrock”
Rhapsody:
“The Bard in Flight”
Shenandoah:
“Child Lost at the Beach”
The Southampton Review:
“Early Morning,” “Oh, Lonesome Me,” “Traffic,” “Goats,” “Portrait,” “Predator”
T Magazine (The New York Times):
“Greece”
“Speed Walking on August 31, 2013,” for Seamus Heaney, was printed in the program for his memorial service in Dublin.
I'm grateful to Bob and Laura Sillerman for their innumerable kindnesses and to Dana Prescott, my host at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, where some of these poems were written. Thanks also to the many helpful people at Random House, especially my new editor Andrea Walker.
Great appreciation to Suzannah Gilman, whose pencil sharpened many of these poems, and to George Green, who graded them with his usual empathetic severity.
The Rain in Portugal
Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems
Horoscopes for the Dead
Ballistics
The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems
Nine Horses
Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
Picnic, Lightning
The Art of Drowning
Questions About Angels
The Apple That Astonished Paris
Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds
(illustrations by David Allen Sibley)
180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day
Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR
BILLY COLLINS
is the author of eleven collections of poetry and the editor of
Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry
,
180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day
, and
Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds.
He was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006. A former Distinguished Professor at Lehman College (City University of New York), he is a Distinguished Fellow of the Rollins Winter Park Institute and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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