Usually you appear at the front door

when you hear my steps on the gravel,

but today the door was closed,

not a wisp of pale smoke from the chimney.

I peered into a window

but there was nothing but a table and a comb,

some yellow flowers in a glass of water

and dark shadows in the corner of the room.

I stood for a while under the big tree

and listened to the wind and the birds,

your wind and your birds,

your dark green woods beyond the clearing.

This is not what it’s like to be you,

I realized as a few of your magnificent clouds

flew over the rooftop.

It is just me thinking about being you.

And before I headed back down the hill,

I walked in a circle around your house,

making an invisible line

which you would have to cross before dark.

[Billy Collins, The Trouble With Poetry (and other poems); New York: Random House, 2005, p. 58]

I’ll never know what it’s like to be you, only what it’s like to pretend to be you. I’d be wise to remember that. The best I can do: join hands with you and share the secrets of our holy and wholly different lives.

I have wished a bird would fly away

And not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the door

When it seemed as if I could bear no more.

The fault must partly have been in me.

The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong

In wanting to silence any song.  Robert Frost

[Frost, A Minor Bird; A New Anthology of Robert Frost’s Poems; New York: Washington Square Press, 1971, p.199]

Sometimes, the songs I try to silence are beautiful. Other times, perhaps they are the ones I most need to hear.  In a world full of people singing their truth or spinning lies, the least I can do is pay attention.

A portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal

[“A poet…never speaks directly, as to someone at the breakfast table.” Yeats]

Every morning I sit across from you

at the same small table,

the sun all over the breakfast things – 

curve of a blue-and-white pitcher, 

a dish of berries – 

me in a sweatshirt or robe,

you invisible.

Most days, we are suspended

over a deep pool of silence.

I stare straight through you

or look out the window at the garden,

the powerful sky,

a cloud passing behind a tree.

There is no need to pass the toast,

the pot of jam,

or pour you a cup of tea,

and I can hide behind the paper,

rotate in its drum of calamitous news.

But some days I may notice

a little door swinging open

in the morning air,

and maybe the tea leaves

of some dream will be stuck

to the china slope of the hour – 

then I will lean forward,

elbows on the table,

with something to tell you,

and you will look up, as always,

your spoon dripping milk, ready to listen.

[Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning; Pittsburgh, PA: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1998, 3-4]

One of the surest signs that a relationship is in trouble: ignoring a partner’s attempt to get attention.

Looks like these two are doing just fine.