Yet Another Reason For My Billy Collins Obsession

I promise to write a real update later, but I'm just so absorbed with poetry lately, I'm finding it difficult not to share. This is my newest favorite.

Rooms
By Billy Collins

After three days of steady, inconsolable rain,
I walk through the rooms of the house
wondering which would be best to die in.

The study is an obvious choice
with its thick carpet and soothing paint,
its overstuffed chair preferable
to a doll-like tumble down the basement stairs.

And the kitchen has a certain appeal--
it seems he was boiling water for tea,
the inspector will offer, holding up the melted kettle.

Then there is the dining room,
just the place to end up facedown
at one end of its long table in a half-written letter

or the bedroom with its mix of sex and sleep,
upright against the headboard,
a book having slipped to the floor--
make it Mrs. Dalloway, which I have yet to read.

Dead on the carpet, dead on the tiles,
dead on the stone cold floor--
it's starting to sound like a ballad
sung in a pub by a man with a coal red face.

It's all the fault of the freezing rain
which is flicking against the windows,
but when it finally lets up
and gives way to broken clouds and a warm breeze,
when the trees stand dripping in the light,

I will quit these dark, angular rooms
and drive along a country road
into the larger rooms of the world,
so vast and speckled, so full of ink and sorrow--

a road that cuts through bare woods
and tangles of red and yellow bittersweet
these late November days.

And maybe under the fallen wayside leaves
there is hidden a nest of mice,
each one no bigger than a thumb,
a thumb with closed eyes,
a thumb with whiskers and a tail,
each one contemplating the sweetness of grass
and the startling brevity of life.