Billy Collins

Of all the questions you might want to ask about angels, the only one you ever hear is how many can dance on the head of a pin. No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge. Do they fly through God's body and come out singing? Do they swing like children from the hinges of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards? Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors? What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes, their diet of unfiltered divine light? What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall these tall presences can look over and see hell? If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole in a river and would the hole float along endlessly filled with the silent letters of every angelic word? If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume the appearance of the regular mailman and whistle up the driveway reading the postcards? No, the medieval theologians control the court. The only question you ever hear is about the little dance floor on the head of a pin where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly. It is designed to make us think in millions, billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one: one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet, a small jazz combo working in the background. She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over to glance at his watch because she has been dancing forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

In the dining room there is a brown fish hanging on the wall who swims along in his frame while we are eating dinner. He swims in candlelight for all to see, as if he has been swimming forever, even in the darkness of the ink before someone thought to draw him and the thin reeds waving in his stream and the clear pebbles strewn upon the sand. No wonder he continues his swimming deep into the night, long after we have blown out the candles and gone upstairs to bed. No wonder I find him in the pale morning light, still swimming, still looking out at me with his one, small, spellbound eye.

How exhilarating it was to march along the great boulevards in the sunflash of trumpets and under all the waving flags— the flag of ambition, the flag of love. So many of us streaming along— all of humanity, really— moving in perfect step, yet each lost in the room of a private dream. How stimulating the scenery of the world, the rows of roadside trees, the huge curtain of the sky. How endless it seemed until we veered off the broad turnpike into a pasture of high grass, headed toward the dizzying cliffs of mortality. Generation after generation, we keep shouldering forward until we step off the lip into space. And I should not have to remind you that little time is given here to rest on a wayside bench, to stop and bend to the wildflowers, or to study a bird on a branch— not when the young are always shoving from behind, not when the old keep tugging us forward, pulling on our arms with all their feeble strength.

Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult. You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade, and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular, the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework. Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon, and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.” Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today. Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone. Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room. We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang. These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code. The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big. People would take walks to the very tops of hills and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking. Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft. We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs. It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead. I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821. Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits. And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment, time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps, or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me recapture the serenity of last month when we picked berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe. Even this morning would be an improvement over the present. I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks. As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past, letting my memory rush over them like water rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream. I was even thinking a little about the future, that place where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine, a dance whose name we can only guess.

In a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery where my parents are buried side by side beneath a slab of smooth granite. Then, all day, I think of him rising up to give me that look of knowing disapproval while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.

Why do we bother with the rest of the day, the swale of the afternoon, the sudden dip into evening, then night with his notorious perfumes, his many-pointed stars? This is the best— throwing off the light covers, feet on the cold floor, and buzzing around the house on espresso— maybe a splash of water on the face, a palmful of vitamins— but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso, dictionary and atlas open on the rug, the typewriter waiting for the key of the head, a cello on the radio, and, if necessary, the windows— trees fifty, a hundred years old out there, heavy clouds on the way and the lawn steaming like a horse in the early morning.

Every reader loves the way he tells off the sun, shouting busy old fool into the English skies even though they were likely cloudy on that seventeenth-century morning. And it’s a pleasure to spend this sunny day pacing the carpet and repeating the words, feeling the syllables lock into rows until I can stand and declare, the book held closed by my side, that hours, days, and months are but the rags of time. But after a few steps into stanza number two, wherein the sun is blinded by his mistress’s eyes, I can feel the first one begin to fade like sky-written letters on a windy day. And by the time I have taken in the third, the second is likewise gone, a blown-out candle now, a wavering line of acrid smoke. So it’s not until I leave the house and walk three times around this hidden lake that the poem begins to show any interest in walking by my side. Then, after my circling, better than the courteous dominion of her being all states and him all princes, better than love’s power to shrink the wide world to the size of a bedchamber, and better even than the compression of all that into the rooms of these three stanzas is how, after hours stepping up and down the poem, testing the plank of every line, it goes with me now, contracted into a little spot within.

All you have to do is listen to the way a man sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people and notice how intent he is on making his point even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver, and you will know why the women in science fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine when the men from earth arrive in their rocket, why they are always standing in a semicircle with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart, their breasts protected by hard metal disks.

They say you can jinx a poem if you talk about it before it is done. If you let it out too early, they warn, your poem will fly away, and this time they are absolutely right. Take the night I mentioned to you I wanted to write about the madmen, as the newspapers so blithely call them, who attack art, not in reviews, but with breadknives and hammers in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam. Actually, they are the real artists, you said, spinning the ice in your glass. The screwdriver is their brush. The real vandals are the restorers, you went on, slowly turning me upside-down, the ones in the white doctor's smocks who close the wound in the landscape, and thus ruin the true art of the mad. I watched my poem fly down to the front of the bar and hover there until the next customer walked in— then I watched it fly out the open door into the night and sail away, I could only imagine, over the dark tenements of the city. All I had wished to say was that art was also short, as a razor can teach with a slash or two, that it only seems long compared to life, but that night, I drove home alone with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart except the faint hope that I might catch a glimpse of the thing in the fan of my headlights, maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp, poor unwritten bird, its wings folded, staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.

That morning under a pale hood of sky I heard the unambiguous scrape of spackling against the side of our wickered, penitential house. The day mirled and clabbered in the thick, stony light, and the rooks’ feathered narling astounded the salt waves, the plush coast. I lugged a bucket past the forked coercion of a tree, up toward the pious and nictitating preeminence of a school, hunkered there in its gully of learning. Only later, by the galvanized washstand, while gaunt, phosphorescent heifers swam beyond the windows, did the whorled and sparky gib of the indefinite wobble me into knowledge. Then, I heard the ghost-clink of milk bottle on the rough threshold and understood the meadow-bells that trembled over a nimbus of ragwort— the whole afternoon lambent, corrugated, puddle-mad.