Ode to Billy Collins

Summer Zinnias, City Market, Kansas City

Sometimes you just need the perfect poem to describe how you should remember to be thinking about your life. What do you think?

I pick an orange from a wicker basket
and place it on the table
to represent the sun.
Then down at the other end
a blue and white marble
becomes the earth
and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.

I get a glass from a cabinet,
open a bottle of wine,
then I sit in a ladder-back chair,
a benevolent god presiding
over a miniature creation myth,

and I begin to sing
a homemade canticle of thanks
for this perfect little arrangement,
for not making the earth too hot or cold
not making it spin too fast or slow

so that the grove of orange trees
and the owl become possible,
not to mention the rolling wave,
the play of clouds, geese in flight,
and the Z of lighting on a dark lake.

Then I fill my glass again
and give thanks for the trout,
the oak, and the yellow feather,

singing in a room full of shadows,
as sun and earth and moon
circle one another in their impeccable orbits
and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.
-- Billy Collins, As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse