CREATURES by Billy Collins Hamlet noticed them in the shapes of clouds, but I saw them in the furniture of childhood, creatures trapped under surfaces of wood, one submerged in a polished sideboard, one frowning from a chair-back, another howling from my mothers silent bureau, locked in the grain of maple, frozen in oak. I would see these presences, too, in a swirling pattern of wallpaper or in the various greens of a porcelain lamp, each looking so melancholy, so damned, some peering out at me as if they knew all the secrets of a secretive boy. Many times I would be daydreaming on the carpet and one would appear next to me, the oversize nose, the hollow look. So you will understand my reaction this morning at the beach when you opened your hand to show me a stone you had picked up from the shoreline. Do you see the face? you asked as the cold surf circled our bare ankles. Theres the eye and the line of the mouth, like its grimacing, like its in pain. Well, maybe thats because it has a fissure running down the length of its forehead not to mention a kind of twisted beak, I said, taking the thing from you and flinging it out over the sparkle of blue waves so it could live out its freakish existence on the dark bottom of the sea and stop bothering innocent beachgoers like us, stop ruining everyones summer. -- Billy Collins, Creatures from Nine Horses. Copyright © 2002 by Billy Collins. Reprinted with the permission of Random House, Inc.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Feb 2014 15:53:59 +0000
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