The Rain in Portugal by Billy Collins

Author:Billy Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

Muybridge’s Lobsters

At first sight

the photographs in the series

appear to be the same—

all black and white,

a single lobster

at the center of each,

underwater, probably in a tank.

But look more closely

along the rows

and you will see the motion

of a single antenna, waving

as if to ask a question,

something you had missed.

Of course, this was late

in the old man’s life,

well after the gymnasts

and the airborne racehorses,

after the leap-frogging boys

and that woman

hopping over a footstool,

even after the photographs of himself

swinging a coal-pick in the nude.

And then the lobster studies—

a reminder perhaps

of the falling off to come for us all,

a focus on the smaller parts

like a settlement of crumbs

beside a cup and saucer

or the bars of light on a painted wall.

That day at the exhibition

a small boy asked his mother

why the pictures were not in color,

too young to know that a lobster

wagging its claws at the bottom of the sea

is either black or a very dark green

and that it must be coaxed, by boiling, into being red.

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