Billy Collins Poems

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

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

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

You know the parlor trick.
wrap your arms around your own body
and from the back it looks like
someone is embracing you
...

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,
...

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

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
...