Dear Reader

Dear Reader


Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you
every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not
closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost,
dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.

Pope welcomes you
into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid
to show you.
Tennyson lifts the latch
to a moated garden,
and with Yeats you lean against
a broken pear tree,
the day hooded by low clouds.

But now you are here with me,
composed in the open field of this page,
no room or manicured garden to enclose us,
no Zeitgeist marching in the background,
no heavy ethos thrown over us like a cloak.

Instead, our meeting is
so brief and accidental,
unnoticed by the monocled eye of History,
you could be the man I held the door for
this morning at the bank or post office
or the one who wrapped my speckled fish.
You could be someone
I passed on the street
or the face behind the wheel
of an oncoming car.

The sunlight flashes off your windshield,
and when I look up into the small,
posted mirror,
I watch you diminish—my echo, my twin—
and vanish around a curve in this whip
of a road we can't help traveling together.


Billy Collins

Posted over on Poetry Archive