Billy Collins in my Pocket

This past Saturday I took a walk at Crissy Field with writer, poet, and friend, Letitia Momirov:

Route and destination were not important; we wanted to talk writing, poetry, process, passion.

What emerged from our discussion? We both share a fantasy of living and writing in the Irish countryside. Tish finds she’s happiest with her work if she writes in the morning and has made that her practice. As a night owl, I made the commitment to set my alarm an hour earlier to give morning writing a try. Yikes!

We both recommend The Keep, a novel by Jennifer Egan www.jenniferegan.com and Tish recommends Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, www.pattismith.net

And because April is National Poetry Month, Tish taught me to carry a poem in my pocket.

We had just shared our thoughts on psychic proclivities when we discovered both of us happened to have Billy Collins in our pockets. Here’s the sly poem Tish chose for me:

Writing in the Afterlife 

BY BILLY COLLINS

 

I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,

shot with pristine light,

not this sulphurous haze,

the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.

 

 

Many have pictured a river here,

but no one mentioned all the boats,

their benches crowded with naked passengers,

each bent over a writing tablet.

 

 

I knew I would not always be a child

with a model train and a model tunnel,

and I knew I would not live forever,

jumping all day through the hoop of myself.

 

 

I had heard about the journey to the other side

and the clink of the final coin

in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,

but how could anyone have guessed

 

 

that as soon as we arrived

we would be asked to describe this place

and to include as much detail as possible—

not just the water, he insists,

 

 

rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,

not simply the shackles, but the rusty,

iron, ankle-shredding shackles—

and that our next assignment would be

 

 

to jot down, off the tops of our heads,

our thoughts and feelings about being dead,

not really an assignment,

the man rotating the oar keeps telling us—

 

 

think of it more as an exercise, he groans,

think of writing as a process,

a never-ending, infernal process,

and now the boats have become jammed together,

 

 

bow against stern, stern locked to bow,

and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.

 

www.billy-collins.com

Letitia Momirov’s poetry will be published in Compass Rose www.chestercollege.edu/compassrose in May and The Healing Muse www.upstate.edu/bioethics/thehealingmuse in October. Neither is National Poetry Month, but I do intend to carry her poems in my pocket.