Tuesday, November 11, 2008

I wish things were different a lot. I wish I had enough money to buy the gorgeous black scarf for $68 I found the other day. I wish summer came back--it just wasn't long enough this year, and now you need a coat outside even when the sun is out. When you go running your ears ache, even when you wear a dorky lime sweatband with neon squiggles all over it that you found in your dad's old ski jacket. That is terrible.

So I have the blues, and lately it seems like everyone else does too. I wish I could offer some encouraging words, but the truth is, no one likes those people who act cheery when they don't really mean it. Sometimes you just want to take your gratitude journal and throw it in boiling water. Not that I have one of those but...okay, I love this poem, it makes me laugh every time I read it and I want to share it with you. So cheer up!




I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakey’s Version Of “Three Blind Mice"


And I start wondering how they came to be blind.
If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.

Or was it a common accident, all three caught
in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?
If not,
if each came to his or her blindness separately,

how did they ever manage to find one another?
Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse
to locate even one fellow mouse with vision
let alone two other blind ones?

And how, in their tiny darkness,
could they possibly have run after a farmer’s wife
or anyone else’s wife for that matter?
Not to mention why.

Just so she could cut off their tails
with a carving knife, is the cynic’s answer,
but the thought of them without eyes
and now without tails to trail through the moist grass

or slip around the corner of a baseboard
has the cynic who always lounges within me
up off his couch and at the window
trying to hide the rising softness that he feels.

By now I am on to dicing an onion
which might account for the wet stinging
in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard’s
mournful trumpet on “Blue Moon,”

which happens to be the next cut,
cannot be said to be making matters any better.

Billy Collins

1 comment:

Mandy said...

I love that poem! It;s hilarious, and definitely cheered me up - What a great blog post :) I'm glad you did that instead of writing the paper.