This is the beginning. …
Billy Collins
I am writing this on a strip of white birch bark …
One bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago …
I pour a coating of salt on the table …
I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna …
The name of the author is the first to go …
There is no noisier place than the suburbs, …
I ask them to take a poem …
That morning under a pale hood of sky …
They say you can jinx a poem …
All you have to do is listen to the way a man …
Every reader loves the way he tells off …
Why do we bother with the rest of the day, …
In a rush this weekday morning, …
Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult. …
I am glad I resisted the temptation, …
In the dining room there is a brown fish …
Of all the questions you might want to ask …
It seems these poets have nothing …
For one thing, there’s no more snow …
There is the sudden silence of the crowd …
Today we woke up to a revolution of snow, …
I knew that James Whistler was part of the Paris scene, …
Just as in the horror movies …
You see them on porches and on lawns …
I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions …
It was Adolphe Sax, remember, …
The other day I was ricocheting slowly …
How exhilarating it was to march …
I thought about his death for so many hours, …
If ever there were a spring day so perfect, …
A little heat in the iron radiator, …
I might as well begin by saying how much I like the title. …
I imagined the atmosphere would be clear, …