Texts

Billy Collins, "Christmas Sparrow"

The first thing I heard this morning
was a rapid flapping sound, soft, insistent --

wings against glass as it turned out
downstairs when I saw the small bird
rioting in the frame of a high window,
trying to hurl itself through
the enigma of glass into the spacious light.

Then a noise in the throat of the cat
who was hunkered on the rug
told me how the bird had gotten inside,
carried in the cold night
through the flap of a basement door,
and later released from the soft grip of teeth.

On a chair, I trapped its pulsations
in a shirt and got it to the door,
so weightless it seemed
to have vanished into the nest of cloth.

But outside, when I uncupped my hands,
it burst into its element,
dipping over the dormant garden
in a spasm of wingbeats
then disappeared over a row of tall hemlocks.

For the rest of the day,
I could feel its wild thrumming
against my palms as I wondered about
the hours it must have spent
pent in the shadows of that room,
hidden in the spiky branches
of our decorated tree, breathing there
among the metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn,
its eyes open, like mine as I lie in bed tonight
picturing this rare, lucky sparrow
tucked into a holly bush now,
a light snow tumbling through the windless dark.

-- Billy Collins, Nine Horses: Poems (New York: Random House, 2002), 115-116.

It was morning, a bright clear morning, and a wintry sun, thin but bright, was percolating with moderate success through the windows of Professor Augustus Clitheroe’s laboratory. The Professor was not alone, Val Stearman and La Noire were with him. The three were in complete physical contrast; La Noire with her ageless Cleopatra-like beauty, her dark almost blue-black hair rippling round the exquisite face which it framed, her figure the envy of a Venus. Val Stearman, tall, bronzed, early middle-aged, with a thick crop of curly brown hair, just beginning to grey a fraction at the temples, a strong face, a face that had been around. He was muscled like a heavyweight prizefighter, with a brain that most university graduates would envy. Augustus Clitheroe had a domed forehead like a flesh-coloured colander; his beady bright eyes hid behind gigantic horn-rimmed spectacles; his microscopic body seemed over-powered by the size of his head. He was the school-boy’s dream of a “mad professor”. He was almost too good to be true, and yet, if he looked the part physically, he acted it all the more so in real life. He was the most typical professor that Val Stearman had ever met — the most typical professor that anyone had ever met, for that matter — hawk-like, quixotic, completely immovable when on the track of something in his own particular line of study. He was a cross between an eagle and a bloodhound, and he combined with that the tenacity of a bulldog, and the body of a tadpole. But whatever nature had done to him, by way of playing a horrible joke on his torso, his mind more than compensated for it, for Augustus Clitheroe had far more letters after his name than in it, and a great many more which he never troubled to use. Brilliant wasn’t the word. He was superb. Though primarily noted for his work in the archaeological field, there was nothing to which he could not turn his hand and his mind with almost limitless success. His greatest failure in life, as he admitted frankly and rather ruefully, was his inability to grow hair on the gigantic dome that served him as a skull. He was as innocent of hirsute growth as a newly-polished billiard ball.

-- R. Lionel Fanthorpe (aka Bron Fane), "The Green Sarcophagus"

Yummy PDF Library. David Pearce, The Hedonistic Imperative. Enigmatic Michael Palin statement.