Commuting with Collins

What I love about weekday mornings,

especially one of those spring days

when a few clouds float with hidden purpose

behind the brown sign with sans serif letters that proclaims, “Shady Grove,”

is the way one, wrapped inside the air-conditioned cocoon of the subway,

can disappear into a volume for forty-two perfect minutes.

And if that volume is, say,

A slim new book of poetry by Billy Collins,

(Random House trade paper $13.95),

a tiny museum whose canvases are pages and brushstrokes words,

then the world does not so much recede as transform.

Onto this world, I look from behind the vibrating plexy window

at the silent, blinking horses standing in the yard

and sit with a cup of coffee, a cigarette,

a little something going in the noisy old typewriter.

Then the chimes, an indication that the doors are closing,

a cold blue snap into autumn and the car, an expanse of white ink

disappears into the dark tunnel coiling away and down.