Billy Collins
speaker
17 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 28 Jun
Billy Collins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Whenever my father would take me to the ballpark, I would open up the newspaper the next morning to check out the box score.
Not to see the hits, runs, and errors, which I already knew, but to find the total attendance and make sure my presence had been recorded.
The way I saw it, whatever the total, I would be the number at the very end.
So if the figure was 24,376, I would be the 6th, the only one to be truly counted as an individual.
Without me in the stands, the number would be five, or if some guy came late, it would jump to a seven.
I was the one who made it a six.
And there was my digit, right there on the kitchen table, in black and white, just the way the typesetter said it.
Proof that I existed, and one of my earliest appearances in print.
This is a poem called Dharma.
The way the dog trots out the front door every morning without a hat or an umbrella, without any money or the keys to her doghouse, never fails to fill the saucer of my heart with milky admiration.
Who provides a finer example of a life without encumbrance?
Thoreau, in his curtainless hut, with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi, with his staff and his wire spectacles?
off she goes into the material world with nothing but her brown coat and her modest blue collar following only her wet nose the twin portals of her steady breathing followed only by the plume of her tail
If only she did not shove the cat aside every morning and eat all his food, what a model of self-containment she would be, what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager for a rub behind the ears, so acrobatic in her welcomes.
If only I were not her god.
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