Poetry Journal #14 - Love

The boy at the far end of the train car
kept looking behind him
as if he were afraid or expecting someone

and then she appeared in the glass door
of the forward car and he rose
and opened the door to let her in

and she entered the car carrying
a large black case
in the unmistakable shape of a cello.

She looked like an angel with a high forehead
and somber eyes and her hair
was tied up behind her neck with a black bow.

And because of all that,
he seemed a little awkward
in his happiness to see her,

whereas she was simply there,
perfectly existing as a creature
with a soft face who played the cello.

And the reason I am writing this
on the back of a manila envelope
now that they have left the train together

is to tell you that when she turned
to lift the large, delicate cello
onto the overhead rack,

I saw him looking up at her
and what she was doing
the way the eyes of saints are painted

when they are looking up at God
when he is doing something remarkable,
something that identifies him as God.

-Billy Collins, Nine Horses


I find this poem interesting because of the description of the girl. The speaker, who in the poem is an observer of the interaction between the boy and the girl, doesn't give any indication of the woman's emotion, or action beyond describing her as "somber" and that she enters the cabin and lifts the cello into the overhead compartment. And yet, he calls her an angel, and describes the boy's eyes upon her as comparison to the saints looking upon god.

I think that there is extreme magic to the last two stanzas to this poem. It's a somewhat ordinary description up until then, and then it takes this fantastical descriptive twist. One would never have expected the boy's eyes to be described in such a manner, or have the girl compared to a painting of God. The poem ends in a very special way in that manner.