August 26: "Creatures," Marie Antionette, People Watching

Poets have strange ways of looking at the world.  I know I do.  When other people see a seagull eating a French fry, I see a reincarnated Marie Antionette gobbling a piece of cake.  If there is thunder rumbling in the distance, I hear God suffering from sleep apnea.  Where an oak stands with mustard-colored leaves in October, I recognize fists of light shadowboxing the clouds.

You see what I mean.  Poets just have a different way of understanding the universe.

Billy Collins writes about creature features . . . 

Creatures

by: Billy Collins

Hamlet noticed them in the shapes of clouds,
but I saw them in the furniture of childhood,
creatures trapped under surfaces of wood,

one submerged in a polished sideboard,
one frowning from a chair-back,
another howling from my mother’s silent bureau,
locked in the grain of maple, frozen in oak.

I would see these presences, too,
in a swirling pattern of wallpaper
or in the various greens of a porcelain lamp,
each looking so melancholy, so damned,
some peering out at me as if they knew
all the secrets of a secretive boy.

Many times I would be daydreaming
on the carpet and one would appear next to me,
the oversize nose, the hollow look.

So you will understand my reaction
this morning at the beach
when you opened your hand to show me
a stone you had picked up from the shoreline.

“Do you see the face?” you asked
as the cold surf circled our bare ankles.
“There’s the eye and the line of the mouth,
like it’s grimacing, like it’s in pain.”

“Well, maybe that’s because it has a fissure
running down the length of its forehead
not to mention a kind of twisted beak,” I said,

taking the thing from you and flinging it out
over the sparkle of blue waves
so it could live out its freakish existence
on the dark bottom of the sea

and stop bothering innocent beachgoers like us,
stop ruining everyone’s summer.

I spent most of today at Fall Fest at the university where I teach.  It was hot.  Near 90 degrees.  Thank goodness I was sitting underneath a tent.  Fall Fest is the annual back-to-school event where student organizations, local businesses, non-profits, and churches set up tables, trying to lure students into their fold with free candy, pizza, ice cream, bottled water, socks, tee shirts, and Koozies.  I attended representing the library.

I love people watching.  Assigning stories to the guy who walks by with so many piercings he could be melted down and made into bullets or coins.  Or the girl who's holding onto her friend's hand so hard their fingers are turning the color of birch bark.  Like Billy Collins spying creatures in wood grains, I sat at my table, imagining the couple with the tattooed faces are renegade cyborgs from the distant future.  The world is a constantly fascinating place, full of grinning stones and hollow-faced paneling and young people on the cusp of changing the world.  

And that's only the first day of teaching this semester for Saint Marty!