Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins Page A

Turning Back to Poetry
. He is a
Distinguished Professor of English at
Lehman College of the City
University of New York. He was
appointed Poet Laureate of the
United States for 2001–2003 .

A LSO BY B ILLY C OLLINS
    Poetry 180
(editor)
    Picnic, Lightning
    The Best Cigarette
(CD)
    The Art of Drowning
    Questions About Angels
    The Apple That Astonished Paris
    Video Poems
    Pokerface
    Nine Horses



2002 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
    Copyright © 2001 by Billy Collins
    All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New
York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
    R ANDOM H OUSE T RADE P APERBACKS and colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
    This work was originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., in 2001 .
    Poems from
Picnic, Lightning
, by Billy Collins, © 1998, are reprinted by
permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Poems from
The Art
of Drowning
, by Billy Collins, ©1995, are reprinted by permission of
the University of Pittsburgh Press. Poems from
Questions About Angels
,
by Billy Collins, © 1991, are reprinted by permission of the University
of Pittsburgh Press. Poems from
The Apple That Astonished Paris
, by Billy
Collins, are reprinted by permission of the University of Arkansas
Press. Copyright 1988 by Billy Collins.
    Grateful acknowledgments are due to the editors of the following
publications where some of these poems first appeared.
    The Atlantic Monthly
, “The Iron Bridge,” “Man Listening to Disc,” “Snow
Day”;
Crab Orchard Review
, “Serenade”;
Field
, “Idiomatic,” “Scotland”;
Five Points
, “Pavilion”;
The Gettysburg Review
, “Insomnia,” “The Three
Wishes”;
The Paris Review
, “The Butterfly Effect”;
Pif
, “The Flight of the
Reader”;
Ploughshares
, “The Only Day in Existence,” “Tomes”;
Poetry
,
“Dharma,” “Jealousy,” “Madmen,” “November,” “Reading an Anthology
of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause to Admire the Length
and Clarity of Their Titles,” “Sonnet”;
The Southern Review
, “The
Waitress”;
The Times Literary Supplement
, “Ignorance”
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Collins, Billy.
Sailing alone around the room: new and selected poems / Billy Collins.
p.     cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-43174-5
I. Title.
PS 3553.047478  S25  2000
811′.54— DC 21              99-052861
    Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
    v3.1

I N M EMORIAM
    Katherine Collins (1901–1997)
    William S. Collins (1901–1994)

A Note to the Reader About this Poetry eBook
    The way a poem looks on the page is a vital aspect of its being. The length of its lines and the poet’s use of stanza breaks give the poem a physical shape, which guides our reading of the poem and distinguishes it from prose.
    With an eBook, this distinct shape may be altered if you choose to take advantage of one of the functions of your eReader by changing the size of the type for greater legibility. Doing this may cause the poem to have line breaks not intended by the poet. To preserve the physical integrity of the poem, we have formatted the eBook so that any words that get bumped down to a new line in the poem will be noticeably indented. This way, you can still appreciate the poem’s original shape regardless of your choice of type size.

FROM
The Apple That
Astonished Paris

  (1988)

Another Reason Why I Don’t

Keep a Gun in the House
    The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
    He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
    that he barks every time they leave the house.
    They must switch him on on their way out.
    The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
    I close all the windows in the house
    and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
    but I can still hear him