January 24: Announcement about Poet Laureate of the U. P., Billy Collins, "Madmen"

I just found out last night that some kind of media event to announce the next Poet Laureate of the Upper Peninsula is being planned for Valentine's Day.  I'm not sure what form this media event will take.  Maybe an announcement on the radio.  A public reading.  An airplane flying over Marquette, Michigan, writing the winner's name in pink smoke. 

I hold low expectations of my chances.  There were a lot of other really good and worthy poets nominated along with me.  Whatever happens, I still am really thankful for all of my friends and family who voted for me and kept my hope alive.

Saint Marty has another poem about hope for tonight.  It may not at first seem like it's about hope, but it is.  Wait for it.  It comes at the end, tiny and illusive. 

Madmen

by:  Billy Collins

They say you can jinx a poem

if you talk about it before it is done.

If you let it out too early, they warn,

your poem will fly away,

and this time they are absolutely right.

Take the night I mentioned to you

I wanted to write about the madmen,

as the newspapers so blithely call them,

who attack art, not in reviews,

but with breadknives and hammers

in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.

Actually, they are the real artists,

you said, spinning the ice in your glass.

The screwdriver is their brush.

The real vandals are the restorers,

you went on, slowly turning me upside-down,

the ones in the white doctor's smocks

who close the wound in the landscape,

and thus ruin the true art of the mad.

I watched my poem fly down to the front

of the bar and hover there

until the next customer walked in—

then I watched it fly out the open door into the night

and sail away, I could only imagine,

over the dark tenements of the city.

All I had wished to say

was that art was also short,

as a razor can teach with a slash or two,

that it only seems long compared to life,

but that night, I drove home alone

with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart

except the faint hope that I might

catch a glimpse of the thing

in the fan of my headlights,

maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp,

poor unwritten bird, its wings folded,

staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.