Creatures

Painting by LeRoy



Creatures


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 mother’s 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.
“There’s the eye and the line
of the mouth,
like it’s grimacing,
like it’s in pain.”

“Well, maybe that’s 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 everyone’s summer.


Billy Collins

Posted over on Poetry Foundation