Reading in a Hammock
         
         With one arm raised, I am holding
         The Penguin Book ofFrench Verse over my head,
         assuming one of the standard positions of summer,
         looking up into this little sky of words.
         
         Around the edges of the hook is the larger sky,
         dotted with clouds, and some overhanging branches
         that appear to be slowly swaying back and forth,
         as if I were the one lying motionless,
         
         calmly thumbing through Verlaine and Baudelaire
         while the world around me slides from side to side
         in the lazy rhythm of a hammock.
         Whatever is doing the actual swinging would matter
         
         little to Apollinaire who thought religion
         looked like a hangar on an airfield and
         whose angels plucked geese and wore chef's hats,
         and the drowsier I become the less it matters to me.
         
         Finally rocked beyond words, I close the book
         on all the drolleries and the anguishing,
         all the poems that have moved in my hands
         like butterflies among the flowers of evil.
         
         Above, a soft light shines through an opening
         in the two dark maples that are the poles of my dangling.
         A light so pale and violet it is impossible         
         to tell if I am a man of leisure
         
         or a martyr to idleness, tied to these trees,
         condemned to swing gently in the shade until dead.



 By Billy Collins
         From the book "The Art of Drowning"
         University of Pittsburgh Press
         
         Copyright ©1995
         All rights reserved.
         Reproduced by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
         
                 
         The Art of Drowning
         by Billy Collins
         Price:    $12.95 paper
        ISBN#: 0-8229-5567-9 paper.