Here, There, and Elsewhere

Billy Collins

This late afternoon landscape in Périgord,
which I drink in naked
in a canvas chair by a swimming pool,
a glass of iced anise in my hand,
offers so many delights -
blue sky, large clouds, a sloping green field,
but particularly the wind rustling
a grove of tall poplars,
making the sound of a waterfall heard from a distance.

But rising against all this like a wave
is the temptation to put down the magazine
of the present and imagine the scenes
that others are beholding,
all the elsewheres I am missing -
a man peering into an arroyo in Wyoming,
a priest regarding a hill in Brazil,
a woman by the side of a pond in Connecticut-
and to feel, in spite of this rushing breeze,
stuck in my spot, locked in the toy chest of the here.

And there is the further temptation
to close my eyes, hold my head in my hands
as if I were weeping by this jewel-blue pool
and imagine all the earthly places
that not a soul is witnessing at this moment,


all the mountain flowers, the sides of icebergs,
and other desolate glories
that are the unread page of the world.

In a minute I will open my eyes again
to this green and ochre countryside
with its orchards of hazelnuts,
acres of flowering tobacco,
and the wash and sway of the high trees,
but until then I will turn over in my mind,
like a rock in the hand,
the obscure pleasures
of these unobserved scenes,
remote as the vast spaces of the past and future -
so many unseen movements of water and leaves,
secret angles of sun on stone and cliff,
lost forever, unrepeatable,
never to be seen in such exact secluded light.