Tuesday, June 4, 1991
         
         By the time I get myself out of bed, my wife has left
         the house to take her botany final and the painter
         has arrived in his van and is already painting
         the columns of the front porch white and the decking gray
         
         
         It is early June, a breezy and sun-riddled Tuesday
         that would quickly be forgotten were it not for my
         writing these few things down as I sit here empty-headed
         at the typewriter with a cup of coffee, 4ight and sweet.
         
         I feel like the secretary to the morning whose only
         responsibility is to take down its bright, airy dictation
         until it's time to go to lunch with the other girls,
         all of us ordering the cottage cheese with half a pear.
         
         This is what stenographers do in courtrooms, too,
         alert at their miniature machines taking down every word.
         When there is a silence they sit still as I do, waiting
         and listening, fingers resting lightly on the keys.
         
         This is also what Samuel Pepys did, jotting down in
         private ciphers minor events that would have otherwise
         slipped into the dark amnesiac waters of the Thames.
         His vigilance finally paid off when London caught fire
         
         as mine does when the painter comes in for coffee
         and says how much he likes this slow vocal rendition
         of ~You Don't Know What Love Is" and T figure I will
         make him a tape when he goes back to his brushes and pails.
         
         Under the music I can hear the rush of cars and trucks
         on the highway and every so often the new kitten, Felix,
         hops into my lap and watches my fingers drumming out
         a running record of this particular June Tuesday
         
         as it unrolls before my eyes, a long intricate carpet
         that I am walking on slowly with my head bowed
         knowing that it is leading me to the quiet shrine
         of the afternoon and the melancholy candles of evening.
         
         If I look up, I see out the window the white stars
         of clematis climbing a ladder of strings, a woodpile,
         a stack of faded bricks, a small green garden of herbs,
         things you would expect to find outside a window,
         
         all written down now and placed in the setting
         of a stanza as unalterably as they are seated
         in their chairs in the ontological rooms of the world.
         Yes, this is the kind ofjob I could succeed in,
         
         an unpaid but contented amanuensis whose hands
         are two birds fluttering on the lettered keys,
         whose eyes see sunlight splashing through the leaves,
         and the bright pink asterisks of honeysuckle
         
         and the piano at the other end of this room with
         its small vase of faded flowers and its empty bench.
         So convinced am I that I have found my vocation,
         tomorrow I will begin my chronicling earlier, at dawn,
         
         a time when hangmen and farmers are up and doing,
         when men holding pistols stand in a field back to back.
         It is the time the ancients imagined in robes, as Eos
         or Aurora, who would leave her sleeping husband in bed,

         not to take her botany final, but to pull the sun,
         her brother, over the horizon's brilliant rim,
         her four-horse chariot aimed at the zenith of the sky.
         But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her,
         
         barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window
         in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor.
         She will look in at me with her thin arms extended,
         offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.



   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.