AUDASE

Aristotle


BY BILLY COLLINS B. 1941 Billy Collins






This is the beginning.


Almost anything can happen.


This is where you find


the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,


the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.


Think of an egg, the letter A,


a woman ironing on a bare stage


as the heavy curtain rises.


This is the very beginning.


The first-person narrator introduces himself,


tells us about his lineage.


The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.


Here the climbers are studying a map


or pulling on their long woolen socks.


This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.


The profile of an animal is being smeared


on the wall of a cave,


and you have not yet learned to crawl.


This is the opening, the gambit,


a pawn moving forward an inch.


This is your first night with her,


your first night without her.


This is the first part


where the wheels begin to turn,


where the elevator begins its ascent,


before the doors lurch apart.






This is the middle.


Things have had time to get complicated,


messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.


Cities have sprouted up along the rivers


teeming with people at cross-purposesi


a million schemes, a million wild looks.


Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack


here and pitches his ragged tent.


This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,


where the action suddenly reverses


or swerves off in an outrageous direction.


Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph


to why Miriam does not want Edward's child.


Someone hides a letter under a pillow.


Here the aria rises to a pitch,


a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.


And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge


halfway up the mountain.


This is the bridge, the painful modulation.


This is the thick of things.


So much is crowded into the middlei


the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,


Russian uniforms, noisy parties,


lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a walli


too much to name, too much to think about.






And this is the end,


the car running out of road,


the river losing its name in an ocean,


the long nose of the photographed horse


touching the white electronic line.


This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,


the empty wheelchair,


and pigeons floating down in the evening.


Here the stage is littered with bodies,


the narrator leads the characters to their cells,


and the climbers are in their graves.


It is me hitting the period


and you closing the book.


It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen


and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.


This is the final bit


thinning away to nothing.


This is the end, according to Aristotle,


what we have all been waiting for,


what everything comes down to,


the destination we cannot help imagining,


a streak of light in the sky,


a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.