They say you can jinx a poem <br />if you talk about it before it is done. <br />If you let it out too early, they warn, <br />your poem will fly away, <br />and this time they are absolutely right. <br /> <br />Take the night I mentioned to you <br />I wanted to write about the madmen, <br />as the newspapers so blithely call them, <br />who attack art, not in reviews, <br />but with breadknives and hammers <br />in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam. <br /> <br />Actually, they are the real artists, <br />you said, spinning the ice in your glass. <br />The screwdriver is their brush. <br />The real vandals are the restorers, <br />you went on, slowly turning me upside-down, <br />the ones in the white doctor's smocks <br />who close the wound in the landscape, <br />and thus ruin the true art of the mad. <br /> <br />I watched my poem fly down to the front <br />of the bar and hover there <br />until the next customer walked in-- <br />then I watched it fly out the open door into the night <br />and sail away, I could only imagine, <br />over the dark tenements of the city. <br /> <br />All I had wished to say <br />was that art was also short, <br />as a razor can teach with a slash or two, <br />that it only seems long compared to life, <br />but that night, I drove home alone <br />with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart <br />except the faint hope that I might <br />catch a glimpse of the thing <br />in the fan of my headlights, <br />maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp, <br />poor unwritten bird, its wings folded, <br />staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.<br /><br />Billy Collins<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/madmen/
