Read Online Aimless Love by Billy Collins - Free Book Online

born.
    —Wislawa Szymborska
    I have so many of them I sometimes lose track,
    several hundred last time I counted
    but that was years ago.
    I remember one was made of marble
    and another looked like a goose
    some days and on other days a white flower.
    Many of them appeared only in dreams
    or while I was writing a poem
    with freezing fingers in the house of a miser.
    Others were more like me,
    looking out the window in a worn shirt
    then later staring into the dark.
    None of them ever made the lacrosse team,
    but they all made me as proud
    as I was on the day they failed to be born.
    There is no telling—
    maybe tonight or later in the week
    another one of my children will not be born.
    I see this next one as a baby
    lying naked below a ceiling pasted with stars
    but only for a little while,
    then I see him as a monk in a gray robe
    walking back and forth
    in the gravel yard of an imaginary monastery,
    his head bowed, wondering where I am.
Hangover
    If I were crowned emperor this morning,
    every child who is playing Marco Polo
    in the swimming pool of this motel,
    shouting the name Marco Polo back and forth
    Marco        Polo        Marco        Polo
    would be required to read a biography
    of Marco Polo—a long one with fine print—
    as well as a history of China and of Venice,
    the birthplace of the venerated explorer
    Marco        Polo        Marco        Polo
    after which each child would be quizzed
    by me then executed by drowning
    regardless how much they managed
    to retain about the glorious life and times of
    Marco        Polo        Marco        Polo
Table Talk
    Not long after we had sat down to dinner
    at a long table in a restaurant in Chicago
    and were deeply engrossed in the heavy menus,
    one of us—a bearded man with a colorful tie—
    asked if anyone had ever considered
    applying the paradoxes of Zeno to the martyrdom of St. Sebastian.
    The differences between these two figures
    were much more striking than the differences
    between the Cornish hen and the trout amandine
    I was wavering between, so I looked up and closed my menu.
    If, the man with the tie continued,
    an object moving through space
    will never reach its destination because it is always
    limited to cutting the distance to its goal in half,
    then it turns out that St. Sebastian did not die
    from the wounds inflicted by the arrows:
    the cause of death was fright at the spectacle of their approach.
    Saint Sebastian, according to Zeno, would have died of a heart attack.
    I think I’ll have the trout, I told the waiter
    for it was now my turn to order,
    but all through the elegant dinner
    I kept thinking of the arrows forever nearing
    the pale, quivering flesh of St. Sebastian
    a fleet of them forever halving the tiny distances
    to his body, tied to post with rope,
    even after the archers had packed it in and gone home.
    And I thought of the bullet never reaching
    the wife of William Burroughs, an apple trembling on her head,
    the tossed acid never getting to the face of that girl,
    and the Oldsmobile never knocking my dog into a ditch.
    The theories of Zeno floated above the table
    like thought balloons from the 5th century before Christ,
    yet my fork continued to arrive at my mouth
    delivering morsels of asparagus and crusted fish,
    and after we ate and lifted our glasses,
    we left the restaurant and said goodbye on the street
    then walked our separate ways in the world where things do arrive,
    where people usually get where they are going—
    where trains pull into the station in a cloud of vapor,
    where geese land with a splash on the surface of a pond,
    and the one you love crosses the room and arrives in your arms—
    and, yes, where sharp arrows can pierce a torso,
    splattering blood on the groin and the feet of the saint,
    that popular subject of European religious painting.
    One hagiographer compared him to a hedgehog bristling with quills.
Delivery
    Moon in the upper