To judge by jacket photos, Billy Collins is the sort or person one might walk past at a conference, or in the mall. He's not who one would ask anything of: the time, say, or change for a fifty. And yet he has been Poet Laureate of the United States, and always sells well. His ability to concentrate attention on small indications, without flash, like a sleight-of-hand magician, is extraordinary; he overwhelms, even from an empty or staring start.
Way behind him, here's me. When I was young, I recall leaning over a bridge and watching water. My gaze stopped at the surface, lost, as it were, in Nature's film credits. My eyes followed a leaf, which had dropped from my brother's grip. The point was not romantic awe--I was never in favor of Young Werthe or anyone of his ilk--nor was it nausea in Sartre's sense (for me the universe stubbornly always refused to wobble); the point for us of leaning over a bridge was to be without any task, purpose or meaning, to take a break from a Protestant upbringing that required--as most jobs now do--that one always be, or at least appear to be, busy.
What those fellows on the bridge with staring, unfocused eyes caught from Nature and the Universe, was pretty much nothing, Lord Kelvin's number wrapped in a cookie. But here one of them, middle-aged, comes, yet smiling, looking for all the world as if library fines had never been invented.
David Ritchie, Portland, Oregon ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
