with apologies to Robert Hass and Louise Glück
No one writes poetry
while they are the Poet Laureate
of the United States,
Charles Simic observes
Because who has the time?
Writing a letter
to the 95-year-old
Poet Laureate of Arkansas
can take an entire afternoon.
You do it by hand.
You give yourself over to it,
as you should,
sharing your thoughts:
Green pepper slices
on a white dish of bone.
The rainy streaming of grief.
That kind of thing.
A sort of poetry
but not an actual poem.
It’s a government conspiracy,
Billy Collins says,
taking a sip of his wine.
A conspiracy to stop us
from writing more poems.
That’s the trouble with poetry,
he adds,
and orders coffee
with dessert:
a smoky tiramisu
which we reverently agree
is also a sort of poetry
if not an actual religion.
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