I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of "Three Blind Mice"

I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To
Art Blakey's Version Of "Three Blind Mice"


And I start wondering how they
came to be blind.
If it was congenital,
they could be brothers and sister,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.

Or was it a common accident,
all three caught in a searing explosion,
a firework perhaps?
If not, if each came
to his or her blindness separately,

how did they ever manage
to find one another?
Would it not be difficult
for a blind mouse
to locate even one fellow mouse
with vision
let alone two other blind ones?

And how, in their tiny darkness,
could they possibly have run
after a farmer's wife
or anyone else's wife for that matter?
Not to mention why.

Just so she could cut off their tails
with a carving knife,
is the cynic's answer,
but the thought of them without eyes
and now without tails to trail
through the moist grass

or slip around the corner
of a baseboard has the cynic who
always lounges within me
up off his couch and at the window
trying to hide the rising softness
that he feels.

By now I am on to dicing an onion
which might account for
the wet stinging in my own eyes,
though Freddie Hubbard's
mournful trumpet on "Blue Moon,"

which happens to be the next cut,
cannot be said to be making matters
any better.

Billy Collins

Posted over on Poemhunter