Here's a Billy Collins poem:

(it was written by BILLY COLLINS):

Man in Space

All you have to do is listen to the way a man
sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people
and notice how intent he is on making the point
even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver,

and you will know why the women in science
fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own
are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine
when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,

why they are always standing in a semicircle
with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,
their breastsw protected by hard metal disks.

-Billy Collins

Tony Hoagland uses this poem to talk about metaphor, its intended and unintended parts. And I quote:

In the Collins poem, which seems so tidy, so well "closed," we have the odd sexual subtext of the images - the spread legs and the shiny breasts of the Amazon women. These details probably come from the 1950's science-fiction movies that are the cultural source of Collins's image. Those movies were made, after all, by men, not women, and the result is the oddly confusing image of proto-feminist go-go dancers. It's Barbarella night at the Playboy Mansion! Although this is a poem of feminist empathy, it totes some funny baggage with it. (And doesn't it also, by the way, suggest that women are aliens?) I this sense, metaphors, like prescription drugs, should probably carry a warning label about possible side effects. A label on the Collins poem might say, "Warning: this politically correct poem could prolong your sexism."

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Hoagland says, in the next paragraph: A metaphor's luminosity lies not just in its equivalency but also in its unmanageability." He goes on to celebrate metaphor's "fantastic elasticity" and to introduce me to Laura Kasischke, who he describes as "one of the premier image-makers of my generation." He quotes Mary Oliver, from her book on craft, A Poetry Handbook, and says "Oliver may come off here as the Miss Manners of poetic convention." He goes on to say nicer things about what she says about controlling the image, lest the poem "end up like a carnival ride... In the shed electricity of too much imagery the purpose of the ride -- and a sense of arrival -- may be lost." (Mary Oliver, from A Poetry Handbook, quoted in Real Sofistikashun.)
And I know what Tony and Mary mean, and yet, and yet. What if the poem can be a carnival ride and those sparks and bursts are the only things we can depend on? What if sometimes the brown paper covered grab bag, unexpectedly and rarely, that seemingly random combination of geegaws, odd colored paper and stickers, delights and enthralls and is experience enough?

And what if I'm fooling myself?

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I have just finished Where the Sea Used to Be by Rick Bass. Poetry of winter, I wanted it to snow forever. I was imagining the story taking place somewhere far away, uvula of Michigan maybe, when in the last part of the book there is a weather report from Spokane, and all this fragile wildness snapped into place nearly next door.


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Five Five Oh Eight

I can tell bald eagle from robin,
coot from barn swallow,
magpie from mallard duck,
fruit bat from California quail.
I have too slow an eye for more,
my ear can't separate calls,
which for example may be
tree frogs that aria famously
in April, squirrels, the many
utterings of crows. I don't know.
When I was in high school
I imagined my poetry would
astonish with its nuanced avidity,
its accurate piquant heart.
Owl brown dowdy birds lift
vertically from phone wires,
dive nearly to the water surface,
wheel, fly pall mall towards
each other, avert disaster, voice,
open effortless mouths for insects,
each morning and dusk, aerobatic
geniuses in drab plumage.