A Poem for a Thursday #247

It is 6:00 on Thursday evening and I am only now getting around to writing this post. This week has been incredibly busy and I feel like I have been running behind for days. When I have weeks like this I fall back on poets I have discovered that I love and who have many, many poems I enjoy. Billy Collins is always a good choice. So, here you go; a quick post with much less thought put into the poem I picked than is usual but it is a good one nonetheless.

These are not the lines that came to me
while walking in the woods
with no pen
and nothing to write on anyway.

They are gone forever,
a handful of coins
dropped through the grate of memory,
along with the ingenious mnemonic

I devised to hold them in place——
all gone and forgotten
before I had returned to the clearing of lawn
in back of our quiet house

with its jars jammed with pens,
its notebooks and reams of blank paper,
its desk and soft lamp,
its table and the light from its windows.

So this is my elegy for them,
those six or eight exhalations,
the braided rope of the syntax,
the jazz of the timing,

and the little insight at the end 
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel
sitting by the door.

This is my envoy to nothing
where I say Go, little poem—
not out into the world of strangers' eyes,
but off to some airy limbo,

home to lost epics,
unremembered names,
and fugitive dreams
such as the one I had last night,

which, like a fantastic city in pencil,
erased itself
in the bright morning air
just as I was waking up.

Lines Lost Among Trees
Billy Collins