Design

By Billy Collins b. 1941 Billy Collins

I pour a coating of salt on the table

and make a circle in it with my finger.

This is the cycle of life

I say to no one.

This is the wheel of fortune,

the Arctic Circle.

This is the ring of Kerry

and the white rose of Tralee

I say to the ghosts of my family,

the dead fathers,

the aunt who drowned,

my unborn brothers and sisters,

my unborn children.

This is the sun with its glittering spokes

and the bitter moon.

This is the absolute circle of geometry

I say to the crack in the wall,

to the birds who cross the window.

This is the wheel I just invented

to roll through the rest of my life

I say

touching my finger to my tongue.

Billy Collins, “Design” from The Art of Drowning. Copyright © 1995 by Billy Collins. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press, www.pitt.edu/~press/.

Source: The Art of Drowning (1995)

Biography

Dubbed “the most popular poet in America” by Bruce Weber in the New York Times, Billy Collins is famous for conversational, witty poems that welcome readers with humor but often slip into quirky, tender or profound observation on the everyday, reading and writing, and poetry itself. John Updike praised Collins for writing “lovely poems...Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all . . .

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