The Life of a Writer

me and my love, selves portrait; rockport, massachusetts, october 2008

Some Days
by Billy Collins

Some days I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs,
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it

striding around like a vivid god,
your shoulders in the clouds,
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

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"Some Days" from Picnic, Lightning, by Billy Collins, © 1998. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Online source: Academy of American Poets, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19753

Comments

[Karen Maezen Miller]

Very funny Billy.
But you mean to tell me that real life people know from one day to the next how they are going to spend it?

(Written while sitting down here amidst the wallpaper staring straight ahead with my plastic face living the real life.)