Billy Collins Poems

In most self-portraits it is the face that dominates:
Cezanne is a pair of eyes swimming in brushstrokes,
Van Gogh stares out of a halo of swirling darkness,
Rembrant looks relieved as if he were taking a breather
...

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
...

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

I turn around on the gravel
and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor’s office,
...

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

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

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.
...

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,
...