Billy Collins Poems

Tonight the moon is a cracker,
with a bite out of it
floating in the night,
...

First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.
...

Today I pass the time reading
a favorite haiku,
saying the few words over and over.
...

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
...

They say you can jinx a poem
if you talk about it before it is done.
If you let it out too early, they warn,
your poem will fly away,
...

And I start wondering how they came to be blind.
If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.
...

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.
...

I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
...

In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
...