Your Sunday Poem

Last month ago in the L.A. Times, there was a story by Oliver Gettell about a poetry reading done at Royce Hall (UCLA) by poets Kay Ryan and Billy Collins. Gettel begins by noting, “After reading a truly good poem, one finds it hard to look at the world in quite the same way again.” Both Collins and Ryan write poems that are often “witty,” but always with a knife’s sharp edge hiding in amongst the words. Said Ryan of Collins’ work, “In a way, I enjoy what so very many people enjoy, and that is the easy, inviting tone and pace of his work, where he walks you down a path and the path gets much more interesting and funnier than you knew.”

Here’s an excellent example of what Ryan and Gettell are talking about, from Collin’s new book, Horoscopes for the Dead.

Roses

In those weeks of midsummer
when the roses in gardens begin to give up,
the big red, white, and pink ones –
the inner, enfolded petals growing cankerous,
the ones at the edges turning brown
or fallen already, down on their girlish backs
in the rough beds of turned-over soil,

then how terrible the expressions on their faces,
a kind of was it all really worth it? look,
to die here slowly in front of everyone
in the garden of a bed-and-breakfast
in a provincial English market town,
to expire by degrees of corruption
in plain sight of all the neighbors passing by,

the thin mail carrier, the stocky butcher
(thank God the children pay no attention),
the swiveling faces in the windows of the busses,
and now this stranger staring over the wall,
his hair disheveled, a scarf loose around his neck,
writing in a notebook, writing about us no doubt,
about how terrible we look under the punishing sun.