For some reason the best love poetry is the most depressing stuff out there.
Why is this? Well, because happy love poetry annoys us. We don’t like to hear about how content you are, how fulfilling your sex life is, how gloriously well-suited you and your spouse are. It makes us feel bad about ourselves and our own lackluster relationships. No, we want to hear about how miserable you are, and how much your soul aches from the abuse of the only one you’ve ever loved and ever will love and how now that this affair is over you will never love again because it’s too painful and it all makes you want to find someone to gouge out your eyes like Lear’s poor old Gloucester.
Enter Billy Collins.
Collins is known for his gentle humor and quirkiness. Who else could incorporate eleven nursery school names in a single poem (“Snow Day”) without causing a worldwide poetry revolt? No one else. Billy Collins is acutely aware of the darker side of every adorable occasion. He knows that the girls with bouncy blonde hair and faultless blue eyes on the playground are actually little despots plotting to ruin each other. This is the kind of truth that rescues Collins’ poetry from the maudlin.
So although Collins is a master of the gentle lyric, every so often he lets himself fall into a dark place, and the results are always admirable. I love the poems that do not make it into his readings on NPR, do not get anthologized and praised, do not become beloved of fifth grade teachers, those wonderful bastions of good taste and mildness. Here is one such poem. After reading it, the word ‘armadillo’ will always give me shivers. Now that’s a successful simile.
Night Sand
When you injure me, as you must one day,
I will move off like the slow armadillo over night sand,
ambulating secretly inside his armor,
ready to burrow deep or curl himself into a ball
which will shelter his soft head, soft feet
and tail from the heavy, rhythmic blows.
Now can you see the silhouettes of ranchers’ hats
and sticks raised against the pink desert sky?
--Billy Collins, from Questions About Angels (1991)
