Ars Poetica

by Linda Pastan

for Billy Collins

As I sit reading your book of poems,

page after page

of ordinary things

but with a twist—the kind of flavor

a twist of lime can give

a gin and tonic,

I wonder why I can’t

write poems like that, melancholy

but not sad exactly,

instead of writing the way

I always do

under a darkening cloud.

And so I take pencil to paper

and try to describe your book,

why it makes me happy.

But here comes that cloud again,

no larger at the moment

than a man’s hand.

From The Gettysburg Review, Summer 2015. See also Linda Pastan’s “Why Are Your Poems So Dark?”