Introduction to Poetry

by Billy Collins


I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Divorce

I actually didn’t miss too much about you
after the truth came out.
The week after it ended I cleaned
and found the things you left behind:

my tank top in the middle of the floor-
a black puddle where you threw it,
a beer bottle full of urine,
a bible with a bookmark on forgiveness,
a spider web in the window sill,
your teeth in the carpet.

I told myself
that I should have cleaned this place sooner.
It had been disgusting in here.

And I didn’t care what you sought
in city parks at midnight,
whispering to suspicious looking characters,
“Dealing?”

I didn’t blame you for finding a woman
on a street corner
when she asked,
“Are you looking for somebody?”

I didn’t hate you for what you did
in the front seat of your car
in a seat I thought had been reserved for me.

I miss you when I can’t think about these things anymore.
When I wake up in the night from a dream that you were in
and every detail I forgot.

I reach out beyond consciousness
unconsciousness
subconsciousness
beyond right and wrong
trying to remember
how I would wake
in the night
while you were sleeping.
You would be holding my hand,
fingers twisted like a dug up rooted riddle.
I am a bottomless well.
I still reach to hear I love you
in the silence.

Those Winter Sundays

by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?