As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse by Billy Collins

Billy Collins

As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse by Billy Collins

T.

Have a few minutes to spare before midnight. Using it to say thanks for friends who’ve been with me through the years, dinner at a new restaurant, peanut butter crepes, and Billy Collins who knows a thing or two about gratitude.

As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse

Billy Collins

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 lightning on a dark lake.

Then I fill my glass again

and give thanks for the trout,

the oak, and the yellow feather,

singing the 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.

—

From Nine Horses by Billy Collins, published by Picador USA, 2002.

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poetry