A Moment In Poetry

Introduction to Poetry

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.

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From The Apple that Astonished Paris, 1996University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, Ark.Permissions information. Copyright 1988 by Billy Collins. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.